Long before Korean film, television and music achieved global prominence, the curator and scholar Beth McKillop, who has died of metastatic breast cancer aged 72, was arguing that Korean artistic traditions deserved attention in their own right, rather than as a footnote to the histories of China or Japan.
Through her work at the Victoria & Albert Museum and at the British Library, McKillop helped transform how Korean art was understood, introducing visitors, students and researchers to the country’s ceramics, books and design, and helping establish a field that is now central to the study of east Asian art in Britain.
Her greatest achievement came between 1990 and 1993, when she was seconded from the British Library to the V&A as Samsung curator of Korean art, and established the UK’s first permanent museum gallery dedicated to the subject. Drawing on relationships she developed across South Korea, McKillop expanded the V&A’s Korean holdings by more than 120 objects, both historical and contemporary.
These included a striking celadon vase (1990) by the ceramic artist Shin Sang-ho, which exemplifies the dialogue between tradition and innovation that McKillop sought to highlight. As she noted in her catalogue, “the vase pays homage to the Koryŏ tradition [AD918-1392] with its spreading rim, small loops at the shoulders, and delicately inlaid pair of white and black cranes in flight”, yet diverges with its angular body.
“The trunk of a pine tree seems to grow out of one of the edge lines that divide the bottle into irregular facets, and its leaves trail into the lines of the glaze crackle.”
As well as ceramics, the gallery introduced visitors to Korean textiles, furniture and decorative arts. A late-19th-century colourful folding screen depicts the four seasons with birds and flowers. A wonsam bridal robe made by the fashion designer Lee Young-hee, shows how traditions continue to evolve. A 1991 tanch’ŏng painting (used to decorate wooden architecture) demonstrates the mastery of the Buddhist monk the Venerable Yi Man-bong.
McKillop’s interest in Korea began almost by accident. While working in the Chinese section of the British Library during the early 1980s, she recognised that the institution’s Korean collections lacked specialist expertise. Supported by the library, she began studying Korean at the School of Oriental and African Studies (now Soas University of London) under William Skillend, one of the founders of Korean studies in Britain. What started as a practical response to a curatorial need became the defining intellectual commitment of her career.
Born in Glasgow, Beth was the eldest daughter of four children born to Mary (nee Chalmers), a teacher, and Norman McConochie, a quantity surveyor. She attended Glasgow high school, where she skipped a year, before joining Laurel Bank school. Aged 16 she entered the University of Glasgow, gaining a humanities degree before continuing at Churchill College, Cambridge, where she did a second degree in Chinese studies and was among the first cohort of women admitted to the college.
After graduating in 1975 she was selected by the British Council to take part in an academic exchange programme in China. She studied first at a language institute in Beijing and then at Peking University during the final years of the Cultural Revolution. The experience left a lasting impression. She later recalled participating in wheat harvests, transplanting rice seedlings and helping to assemble railway engines alongside fellow students.
Following a brief period with the BBC Monitoring Service, where she summarised Chinese-language broadcasts, she joined the British Library in 1981. There she worked first as a research assistant and later as curator of the Chinese and Korean collections.
Among her key projects was on the library’s collection of manuscripts from Dunhuang, acquired by the explorer Aurel Stein. Collaborating with Chinese scholars and conservators, she helped make thousands of rare manuscript fragments more accessible through cataloguing, conservation and publication.
She also worked closely with the Japanese scholar Yukio Fujimoto on the first detailed catalogue of the library’s early Korean books. McKillop would become one of Britain’s leading authorities on Korean book history and printing – her essay The History of the Book in Korea was published in the Oxford Companion to the Book in 2010.
Following the establishment of diplomatic relations between Britain and North Korea in 2000, McKillop joined British Library and British Museum delegations on visits to the country in 2001 and 2002, resulting in the book North Korean Culture and Society (2004), co-written with her colleague Jane Portal. She later observed that North Korea reminded her of China during the Cultural Revolution, recalling dinners in vast, sparsely occupied halls where damp tablecloths were used to remove creases before official banquets.
In 2004 she returned to the V&A as keeper of Asia. During the following decade she oversaw major projects including China Design Now, in 2008, and the creation of the Robert H N Ho Family Foundation Galleries of Buddhist Art. She later became director of collections and deputy director of the V&A.
Even after retiring from executive leadership in 2016, she remained an active scholar, pursuing new research projects. Her final major publication, also co-written with Portal, was Precious Beyond Measure: A History of Korean Ceramics (2024).
A thoughtful and fair-minded leader, she was admired for her encouragement of younger curators and researchers, many of whom credited her with shaping their careers.
Her influence extended beyond the institutions where she worked, through teaching at Soas, lectures at international programmes including the University of Virginia in Charlottesville Rare Book School, and as president of the Oriental Ceramic Society from 2018 to 2021.
She was also a trustee of National Museums Scotland and the Sir Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art, in which capacity McKillop was responsible for brokering its Chinese ceramics collection into the custodianship of the British Museum in 2025.
The museum’s director, Nicholas Cullinan, described it as “the greatest gift to any museum in the modern era”.
In 1973 she married Andy McKillop, a publishing director who later became a gardener and artist. He survives her, along with their daughter, Lucy, son, Joe, and a grandson, Sam.
• Elizabeth Dorothy McKillop, curator, museum leader and scholar, born 28 May 1953; died 26 May 2026
