Ethics and 'artwashing': The controversies surrounding Centre Pompidou Hanwha

On the morning of June 4, as Centre Pompidou Hanwha had its grand opening at the foot of Yeouido’s 63 Building, the streets outside were filled with those having a less celebratory conversation.

Eleven civic groups had gathered to call the museum what they took it to be — not a cultural bridge but a laundering operation, a way for an arms manufacturer to buy its way into softer influence. The charge, compressed into the word “artwashing,” is only the loudest of several controversies that have trailed the newly opened venue.

The museum is the Seoul branch of France’s Centre Pompidou, brought in by Hanwha Group under a four-year partnership signed in 2023 and housed in a new annex beside the 63 Building. Its debut show, a survey of the Cubists running through October, drew on average 3,000 visitors daily during the first week of opening, according to the museum. 

The protest on opening day was about money — and where it comes from.

Under an organized global movement titled “Abandon Hanwha,” calling for a boycott of the museum, a coalition of civic groups that gathered in front of the museum argued that the Hanwha Foundation of Culture bankrolling the museum is inseparable from Hanwha Group’s defense business.

The Hanwha Foundation of Culture drew some 45 billion won ($29.5 million) from group affiliates in 2024 alone, the year the construction of the new museum began, and has paid roughly 17 billion won in royalties to the Centre Pompidou over the past two years, according to a statement from civic group Artists’ Solidarity Against Censorship, which lead the coalition that participated in the protest on June 4.

Among its principal backers, the solidarity and other civic groups argue, are Hanwha Systems and Hanwha Aerospace — firms the coalition accuses of “complicity in Israel’s weapons production and export” and thus profiting from a war that has killed roughly 72,000 Palestinians.

The coalition’s joint statement, which by the afternoon of the Centre Pompidou Hanwha’s opening had drawn around 1,400 signatures, carries the line “art cannot be a tool for laundering violence” and demands that Hanwha Group withdraw both its “genocidal cooperation with the Israeli weapons industry” and a museum “built with profits earned from war.”

The protest drew more than a hundred participants and began with a moment of silence — for the casualties of war and for the workers killed three days earlier in an explosion at a Hanwha Aerospace plant in Daejeon.

The criticism has since traveled to Paris, where French news outlet Liberation reported that prominent French intellectuals and artists, some even with ties to the main branch Pompidou itself, had signed a letter urging the museum to end the partnership with Hanwha Group.

The Hanwha Foundation of Culture rejects the accusations put forth by the coalition of civic groups.

“We are a nonprofit cultural foundation whose mission is to support artists and international cultural exchange,” the foundation told the Korea JoongAng Daily. “Our work is pursued not as corporate publicity but on the basis of the public value of art and a recognition of social responsibility.”

“Our programs are planned and operated independently according to the foundation’s own vision and purpose and are entirely unrelated to the parent company’s business direction,” the foundation added.

The foundation did not dispute that the money flows from Hanwha Group so much as cast the arrangement as ordinary; the foundation runs not on “the funds of any single affiliate” but on contributions from several — Hanwha Life, Hanwha General Insurance and Hanwha Systems among them — which it described as “one of the common funding structures for corporate cultural foundations.”

On the ethics of patronage, the Hanwha Foundation of Culture noted that “support must be built on social trust and responsibility, beyond mere financial backing,” and that the foundation “does not take these questions lightly.”

None of this is new, but to understand the controversy more deeply, the defense business itself and how the public views companies reaching into the art sector need to be considered, noted culture critic Kim Hern-sik.

“These issues didn’t arrive overnight, and the artwashing accusation isn’t just confined to Israel,” said Kim. “Hanwha is at its core a defense company, and defense is ultimately tied to war — it develops weapons and sells them for profit, so a Pompidou arts museum becomes a way to bleach that image.”

“We’ve approached the defense industry too much through its share price, and the fundamental reflection on it has thinned out,” Kim pointed out. The explosion at the Hanwha Aerospace plant in Daejeon, three days before the opening, is proof, according to Kim.

“The revenue and the stock price from these defense companies all rest on the sacrifice of workers, and society has forgotten that,” he said. “What’s also true is that one company shouldn’t be singled out — Poongsan, Hyundai Rotem and others could run art centers of their own — but these considerations have been long overdue, and conscientious voices need to emerge further.”

BY LIM JEONG-WON [[email protected]]