From pagers to cassette tapes, Seoul museum hunts for relics of Korea’s Generation X

A promotional poster for Seoul Museum of History's donation campaign for Generation X memorabilia / Courtesy of the Seoul Museum of History

The Seoul Museum of History said Tuesday that it is launching a public campaign to salvage the cultural artifacts of the 1990s, calling on citizens to scour their closets, drawers and storage boxes for the relics of Korea’s Generation X before they dissolve entirely into nostalgia.

The archiving initiative, which runs through Dec. 31, seeks to capture the everyday texture of a decade that fundamentally transformed the country socially, economically and technologically. The collected materials will anchor a major retrospective exhibition next year.

Museum curators are casting a wide net, soliciting everything from cassette tapes, CDs and pagers to music magazines, comic books, early PC communication records and fashion staples like vintage denim and sneakers. The campaign also seeks political slogans and memorabilia tied to the 1997 Asian financial crisis, known locally as the IMF crisis.

According to museum officials, Korea’s Generation X came of age at a unique historical fault line. They were the first cohort to enjoy the fruits of the nation's rapid peacetime economic boom, indulging in a newly vibrant consumer culture, only to be jolted by mass layoffs and corporate restructuring when the financial crisis struck in late 1997.

It was also the generation that straddled the tectonic shift from analog to digital. In the 1990s, portable cassette players and pagers became ubiquitous youth accessories, while text-based PC bulletin boards fostered the country's earliest online subcultures. The pop music, cinema, and comic books that flourished during this era laid the groundwork for the contemporary "newtro" retro trends currently sweeping Korean pop culture.

Museum officials emphasized that public participation is vital to preserving this history, noting that roughly 60 percent of the institution’s current archive is built on citizen donations. By crowdsourcing these personal artifacts, the museum hopes to document how ordinary lives navigated a period of intense national metamorphosis, transforming private memories into a permanent civic record.

This article was published with the assistance of generative AI and edited by The Korea Times.