IOCSS Research Paper | Korean Heritage Studies | 2025
Abstract: This paper examines the politics of cultural heritage preservation in the context of Korean division, analyzing how the competing heritage regimes of North and South Korea have constructed divergent accounts of Korean cultural history and how the management of shared cultural heritage has become a site of political contestation. We argue that heritage preservation in divided Korea cannot be understood in purely technical terms but requires analysis of the political and philosophical dimensions of memory, identity, and the claims that present communities make on the past.
1. Introduction: Heritage as Politics
Cultural heritage preservation has increasingly been recognized as a political practice: decisions about what to preserve, how to interpret it, and whose narratives it should embody are inherently contestable and reflect the power relations of the societies that make them. This recognition has transformed heritage studies from a primarily technical field concerned with conservation methodology to an interdisciplinary inquiry that engages with history, cultural theory, political philosophy, and community practice.
The Korean case offers an extreme version of this political character. The division of the Korean Peninsula in 1945, and the subsequent entrenchment of incompatible political systems in North and South Korea, produced two distinct heritage regimes operating on the same cultural material. Both states claim the totality of Korean cultural heritage as their national inheritance; both have developed interpretive frameworks that selectively emphasize historical narratives compatible with their political identities; and both have managed heritage sites and artifacts in ways that make the other's claims on that heritage politically inadmissible.
IOCSS's interest in this question derives from our broader commitment to Korean cultural studies and from the specific work of our NK Heritage project, which documents North Korean cultural objects and creates a digital archive that preserves the heritage record independently of political claims made by either state.
2. The Concept of Cultural Heritage
The UNESCO World Heritage framework defines cultural heritage as encompassing both tangible heritage (monuments, buildings, archaeological sites, objects) and intangible heritage (practices, expressions, knowledge, skills, and the cultural spaces associated with them). This dual definition acknowledges that the significance of cultural objects and sites is not simply a property of their physical existence but is constituted through the practices, meanings, and communities that sustain them.
This relational account of heritage has important implications for the Korean case. Korean cultural heritage—royal palaces, Buddhist temples, traditional crafts, performing arts, folk traditions—derives its significance not simply from its antiquity or formal qualities but from its embeddedness in living communities of practice and memory. The division of Korea severed many of these communities, creating heritage objects that are formally preserved but whose community of meaning has been disrupted or destroyed.
The Korean royal palace complex of Gyeongbokgung in Seoul, for example, is preserved and presented to millions of visitors annually as an expression of Korean cultural continuity. But the court traditions, protocols, and forms of social life that gave Gyeongbokgung its original meaning were definitively ended by the Japanese colonial annexation of 1910 and the subsequent social transformations of the twentieth century. The palace persists; the community that inhabited it does not. Heritage preservation in this context is necessarily an act of reconstruction and representation, not merely conservation.
3. North Korean Heritage Politics
The DPRK's approach to cultural heritage is organized around the political requirements of its founding ideology. The Pyongyang regime presents Korean cultural heritage as the exclusive inheritance of the Korean people as a whole—a people whose authentic national character is expressed by and through the DPRK state. This claim involves both the appropriation of pre-modern Korean heritage and the delegitimization of South Korean heritage claims as products of cultural colonization by the United States and Japan.
North Korean heritage policy has had concrete material consequences. In Pyongyang, the reconstruction of historical sites—including the Koguryo tombs complex, which was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2004—has been managed to emphasize narratives of Korean historical continuity that serve DPRK political mythology. The management of the inscription process was controversial, as South Korea objected that joint inscription with Korean sites on its own territory was being prevented by North Korean political maneuvering.
The documentation of North Korean heritage is severely constrained by access restrictions. IOCSS's NK Heritage project draws on the available evidence—including satellite imagery, historical photographic records, defector testimony, and the limited access afforded to foreign researchers—to maintain a record of heritage conditions that is as independent as possible from the DPRK's managed presentation.
4. South Korean Heritage and the Politics of Representation
South Korea's approach to heritage has evolved significantly over the past generation, from a state-managed framework that emphasized the legitimacy of the ROK as the sole legitimate Korean state to a more pluralistic and globally engaged approach that acknowledges the complexity of Korean cultural history.
The listing of Korean traditional music (pansori), food culture (kimjang, the practice of making kimchi), and other intangible practices on UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage lists has been part of a broader project of cultural diplomacy. South Korea has invested substantially in heritage preservation infrastructure, including world-class conservation facilities, digital documentation programs, and educational initiatives that connect heritage to contemporary cultural identity.
However, South Korean heritage politics is not without its own contradictions. The selective emphasis on heritage that supports contemporary national identity—particularly in the context of the Korean Wave (Hallyu) cultural phenomenon—can privilege certain historical narratives while marginalizing others. The heritage of Korean minority communities, the colonial period experience, and the legacies of the Korean War receive less systematic preservation and interpretation than the premodern royal and aristocratic cultural production that frames the dominant heritage narrative.
5. Prospects for Shared Heritage Management
The question of whether Korean cultural heritage could eventually be managed through shared institutional frameworks—as has occurred in some other divided or post-conflict societies—is both practically and philosophically important. Practically, it depends on the political trajectory of inter-Korean relations. Philosophically, it requires thinking through what shared heritage management would mean for communities that have developed substantially different relationships to the same cultural material.
IOCSS argues that the conditions for genuine heritage sharing are not primarily technical but normative: they require both parties to acknowledge that their particular relationship to shared cultural material is not the only legitimate one, that the claims of the other community on that material are real if different, and that the construction of an authentic shared account may require revision of both parties' dominant narratives.
This is a demanding requirement that neither state currently meets. North Korea's heritage regime explicitly denies the legitimacy of South Korean cultural claims. South Korea's heritage institutions, while more pluralistic, have limited institutional capacity to engage with North Korean heritage expertise and community knowledge. The pathway to shared heritage management is political, and it follows rather than leads political reconciliation.
6. IOCSS's NK Heritage Project
IOCSS's NK Heritage project is a practical response to the recognition that Korean cultural heritage in the North may be at risk from multiple pressures: ideological appropriation, physical deterioration due to resource constraints, and the deliberate destruction that can accompany rapid political change. The project documents North Korean cultural objects—particularly the craft traditions of ceramics, embroidery, and metalwork that have been maintained through DPRK state craft institutions—through a combination of photographic documentation, archival research, and expert analysis.
The documentation produced by the NK Heritage project serves multiple purposes. In the short term, it creates a record that is independent of either state's political management of the heritage narrative. In the medium term, it provides resources for researchers, policymakers, and communities that will be essential in any future process of heritage reconciliation. In the long term, it embodies IOCSS's commitment to Korean cultural continuity as a value independent of the political claims of particular regimes.
The philosophical grounding of this work in engaged aesthetics and critical heritage studies distinguishes it from purely preservationist efforts. IOCSS does not merely document; it analyzes, contextualizes, and argues for a view of Korean cultural heritage that serves the flourishing of Korean communities divided by circumstances they did not choose.
7. Conclusion
Heritage preservation in divided Korea is politics by other means. The decisions made about what to preserve, how to interpret it, and whose communities of meaning it should serve are decisions about Korean identity, political legitimacy, and the relationship between past and present that no purely technical framework can resolve. IOCSS approaches these decisions with philosophical seriousness, committed to an account of Korean cultural heritage that serves the long-term project of Korean reconciliation without being reducible to either state's political requirements.
This paper was prepared by the IOCSS Korean Heritage Studies Division. Correspondence: research@iocss.org