Worldwide, only five museums attract over 5 million visitors a year. Now, South Korea’s National Museum of Korea joins the ranks of the Louvre in Paris, the Vatican Museums, the British Museum, and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, having welcomed 5,016,382 visitors as of Wednesday.
The Seoul-based museum announced Friday that its annual visitor count has surpassed 5 million for the first time since its founding 80 years ago.
Between Jan. 1 and Wednesday, the museum recorded a 69.7 percent increase in visitors, rising from about 2.9 million during the same period last year, according to museum data.
Of the total, 4.83 million visitors were Korean, while 185,705 were from overseas.
This marks the first time since the museum’s establishment in 1945 that the annual number of visitors has exceeded 5 million.
The surge comes amid growing global interest in Korean culture, a trend the museum said has been further boosted by the recent success of Netflix’s animated film “Kpop Demon Hunters.”
According to the UK-based art media The Art Newspaper, four museums, the Louvre, the Vatican Museums, the British Museum and New York’s MoMA, attracted more than 5 million visitors last year,.
seungku99@heraldcorp.com
