The Lucas Museum Is Built. The Time Is Missing.
On September 22, a billion-dollar spaceship opens its doors in Exposition Park. The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art — funded entirely by George Lucas, the man who turned “a long time ago” into legend, designed by Beijing architect Ma Yansong — looks, from a distance, like a cloud that decided to land. Los Angeles has gained another marvel. But before the congratulations, an older question deserves asking: why do LA’s museums have so little gravity?
The Metropolitan Museum draws millions who stand in line because it holds originals of human civilization you can see nowhere else. Visitors come, so patrons want their names on the walls; patronage buys more collection. The flywheel always starts with the thing. In Los Angeles, the sequence runs backward. The building comes first, by a celebrated architect. The opening is dazzling. And then marketing is asked to deliver the audience. But marketing can create a first visit; it cannot create a pilgrimage. Advertising spent on a place with no “only here” is water poured into a cracked jar. This is how more than a few of LA’s museums came to live their quiet afterlife — too endowed to die, too empty to matter.
The reason is simple. A museum is a building made of time, not money. The Met assembled 150 years; the Louvre, centuries. Los Angeles tried to buy time with money. Time is not for sale. So what remained was the house.
The Lucas Museum now stands at the same fork. Fifty years of collecting is extraordinary for one man and infant-aged for a museum. Norman Rockwell, however beloved, will never out-Met the Met. Star Wars nostalgia will sell two months of tickets, but a story told and retold for five decades does not power ten years of return visits. On its current path, even this beautiful house could become one more LA institution: the world’s most expensive building with nothing you must see.
Yet this house holds one advantage no rival has: its identity is not yet set. And the flag Lucas has planted — “a temple to the people’s art,” a home for the arts elite institutions orphaned — points, whether he knows it or not, straight across the Pacific.
Centuries ago in Korea, in family rooms and on commoners’ walls, hung paintings made by artists who left no names, dismissed by the elite as unworthy of the word “art.” They told stories through tigers and magpies, carried wishes for good fortune, and taught children. Korea calls them minhwa (民畵) — literally, “the people’s painting.” The people’s painting existed all across East Asia: China called it the New Year picture (nianhua); Japan named it after a town (otsu-e). But only Korea calls the genre by that very name — the people’s painting. The name Lucas has just given his museum, Korea gave its own paintings long ago. And the lineage never broke: the largest living people’s narrative art on earth — webtoon, read by hundreds of millions and drawn daily by ordinary young people — grows from the same soil.
Where are those tigers and magpies now? On Netflix. This year’s global phenomenon, the animated film KPop Demon Hunters, began with minhwa — its derpy tiger and impudent magpie are lifted straight from the iconography of hojakdo, the Korean tiger-and-magpie painting. A picture that nameless painters once hung on commoners’ walls swept the Golden Globes and the Grammys and took two Academy Awards this March — including the first Oscar for Best Original Song ever won by a K-pop track. Three months later, the voice behind that song, EJAE, sang the official anthem of the World Cup opening ceremony, partly in Korean. And fans around the world went looking for the original tiger — on pilgrimage to the National Museum of Korea in Seoul. The result: last year that museum’s attendance jumped 72 percent to 6.5 million, a level surpassed only by the Louvre and the Vatican, while its merchandise revenue doubled. The people’s painting became pop narrative; pop narrative became a pilgrimage back to the original. The fandom is not a future to be built. It is a present that already exists — it simply has no temple yet in the Western world.
Here lies the only way a young museum acquires time. In a world where Greece, Egypt, and the Impressionists have long been claimed by the Met and the Louvre, the last unclaimed territory of time is the East’s people’s narrative art — the line running from the cave murals of Dunhuang through narrative scrolls and woodblock prints to minhwa, and on to webtoon. Claim that lineage whole, and the Lucas Museum stops being a museum of Rockwell and becomes the only museum of its kind on earth — no longer a house surviving on borrowed time, but the owner of time no one else claimed.
And the first key sits inside this city. Twenty minutes north of Exposition Park lies America’s largest Koreatown; there, and across Los Angeles, live hundreds of thousands of Korean Americans who hold both ends of this lineage at once — the memory of minhwa and the daily practice of webtoon. Whether this museum opens its eastern wall to them as co-authors, or leaves them as spectators, may decide which future it gets. What opens on September 22 is not just a museum. It is a window — and windows close.
© Young Park. Written at HEXA Communications, Los Angeles.
Press inquiries: young@thehexa.com