Corporate art museums are changing from social contribution spending into profit platforms. Hanwha has joined hands with France’s Pompidou Center and is putting ticket and membership revenue models at the forefront. Following Samsung, Lotte and POSCO, Hanwha is also redefining its corporate museum as a core ESG asset, transforming it into a new platform.
Hanwha will open Pompidou Center Hanwha at the 63 Building in Seoul’s Yeouido in June. It also unveiled a membership model with an annual fee of 100,000 to 300,000 won, alongside an adult admission fee of 28,000 won. Some view the shift as a starting point for corporate art museums, long classified as social contribution spending, to be redefined as ESG management assets and revenue models.
Hanwha aims for a multifunctional space that goes beyond viewing through Pompidou Center Hanwha. The opening exhibition will be a curated show looking at Cubism, centered on works from the Pompidou Center’s collection. Remodeling of the basement food and beverage and shopping areas at the 63 Building and the reopening of the observatory are also planned. A Hanwha Culture Foundation official said it would present a new museum model in which rest and experiences flow organically beyond exhibition viewing.
South Korean companies have used museums as a tool for social contribution. The Samsung Cultural Foundation in 2021 put 34.3 billion won, or 95 percent of its 36.1 billion won in project execution costs, into operating the Leeum Museum of Art and the Ho-Am Museum of Art. The country’s largest cultural foundation, with assets of about 2.20 trillion won, chose a method of offering cultural infrastructure to society through collections and space. Unlike donations or scholarship programs, facilities remain, collections accumulate, and the museums function as regional cultural hubs, making it a sustainable social contribution model for companies as well. This approach later became a benchmark for other companies’ museum strategies.
This trend began to intersect with brand strategy in the 2010s. Lotte Museum opened in 2018 in Jamsil’s Lotte World Tower, linking visitor routes with department store and restaurant areas. It brought in a Kenny Scharf exhibition at what it described as Asia’s largest scale and pushed accessibility by changing exhibition techniques through QR codes and interactive works. Amorepacific Museum of Art highlighted Korean aesthetics based on a ceramics and folding-screen collection passed down from its founder and pursued an exhibition strategy that connected this to brand identity. Museums were used as content assets shaping corporate images.
POSCO went a step further. In 2018, marking its 50th anniversary, it added “cultural patriotism” to its company philosophy and renovated the POSCO Center into a complex cultural space. It evolved into a management tool to use a museum to change the external image of a steel B2B company. According to the Korea Mecenat Association, the top reason companies support culture and the arts was local community contribution at 33.8 percent, followed by enhancing corporate image at 19.5 percent. The role of corporate museums has shifted from social contribution to brand strategy, and now to a means of fulfilling the S component of ESG.
COLLECTIONS REPLACED BY A POMPIDOU LOAN, HANWHA’S NEW ESG CALCULATION
A case that showed the ripple effects of corporate museum investment in numbers is the Lee Kun-hee Collection. Bereaved family members of the Samsung family returned about 23,000 artworks to society in 2021, including national-treasure-class cultural assets. The art world estimates the collection at up to 10 trillion won. The National Museum of Korea and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art held 35 touring exhibitions from 2021 to 2024, and cumulative visitors reached 3.5 million.
The National Museum of Korea ranked third in the world in 2025 with annual visitors of 6,507,483, behind the Louvre and the Vatican Museums. A foreign touring exhibition by the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art drew the largest number of visitors among special exhibitions over the past 5 years. It is currently being shown at the Art Institute of Chicago and will continue to the British Museum in October this year. With the full payment of 12 trillion won in inheritance tax and a 700 billion won contribution to build an infectious disease specialty hospital, some assessed that corporate returns to society led to ripple effects across culture, diplomacy and tourism. The structure in which a single art donation pushed the National Museum of Korea to become the world’s third most-visited museum showed the non-financial effects of corporate museum investment in numbers.
The Samsung Cultural Foundation issued its first ESG report in 2022 and formalized museum operations as a key ESG indicator. As it institutionalized decision-making structures through an ESG committee and a museum operations committee, museums began to settle as measurable assets in the governance category as well. The Lee Kun-hee Collection donation became a turning point in this process of converting simple cultural spending into ESG performance indicators.
Against this backdrop, Hanwha has taken out a new approach. It is a strategy to absorb brand value by bringing in global cultural IP, instead of building a collection directly. As the weight of the S category in ESG increases and museums are reclassified as strategic assets rather than costs, it is shifting from competition over collection size to global brand partnerships. Whether Pompidou Center Hanwha can cover operating costs through ticket and membership revenue while also securing public value will be key. An industry official said, “We need to see whether bringing in global IP can become a company’s new ESG grammar.”
