Bonte Museum

Character

Bonte’s strangest room contains a vehicle for the dead. A Korean sangyeo is built like an elaborate house, its roof ridge guarded by dragon-faced boards and its sides crowded with kkokdu—children, clowns, scholars and animals—meant to accompany a person on the final journey

The museum grew from founder Haeng Ja Lee’s more than forty years of collecting Korean traditional crafts. That history is visible in ordinary objects as much as ceremonial ones: low soban tables, wooden furniture, bojagi wrapping cloths and painted screens sit alongside things made for rites that most visitors will never have seen in use

The funeral gallery keeps getting more specific. A smaller yeongyeo carried the spirit tablet and related objects ahead of the main bier. Another wooden frame exists for a much more earthly purpose: carrying food prepared for mourners and guests during the funeral procession

The experience

Gallery 1 begins with objects from daily life—tables, furniture, textiles and screens—whose scale is domestic rather than monumental. Gallery 3 shifts into ancestral ritual. Its spirit chair was never meant for a living person: the seat is deliberately narrow and the legs tall because it held a tablet representing the deceased. A black folding screen maps ritual vessels in gold and labels what each one was used for

Gallery 4 turns those private rites into a procession. The sangyeo, kkokdu and yeongyeo make death look crowded rather than empty. Kkokdu can dance, entertain, guard or accompany; animal figures include tigers and other protective creatures intended to keep harmful spirits away

Contemporary art interrupts that material history without replacing it. The museum currently places Nam June Paik’s TV Cello, Robert Indiana’s LOVE and HOPE, and Tadao Ando’s Meditation Room within the same institution. Outside, the sculpture park extends that collision into the landscape

Then bonstar changes the architecture. Ando’s original 2012 museum is exposed concrete, water and controlled openings. The wing opened in March 2026 uses reflective stainless steel instead. Clouds and daylight alter the new skin while the older concrete remains comparatively fixed; fourteen years of one architect’s work now face each other on the same hillside

History

Lee’s collection came first. Bonte says more than forty years of collecting Korean traditional craft preceded the museum’s opening in 2012. The name means “original form,” and the founding collection was built around things made for use—furniture, textiles, vessels and other craft—rather than around a single art-historical period

Tadao Ando began designing the Jeju museum in 2009. The original complex opened in 2012. The institution then kept widening its scope: the funeral-rite exhibition opened in 2015; Buddhist painting and sculpture entered Gallery 5 in 2024; a gallery devoted to ancestral-rite furnishings opened in 2025

Bonstar arrived in March 2026. Ando returned to a museum that had changed substantially since his first buildings and chose a material he had not used for the original campus: stainless steel. The new wing now holds an Ando exhibition alongside Yayoi Kusama works including Infinity Mirrored Room—Gleaming Lights of the Souls and Pumpkin

Before you go

The six galleries do not form one continuous indoor sequence; the visit moves between the original Ando buildings, outdoor space and the separate bonstar wing. The collection also changes register sharply between domestic craft, ritual objects and contemporary art, so the museum reads less like one exhibition than several small museums sharing a campus

Bonte provides a stroller and two wheelchairs, but its own accessibility guidance warns that some movement can be limited by the architecture. Hall 5 also prohibits photography