Busan Indonesia Center

Art Center · Busan, South Korea

About Busan Indonesia Center

On a stretch of road in Busan's Buk-gu district that the city itself renamed Surabaya-gil, in recognition of Busan's sister-city relationship with Surabaya since 1994, stands a five-story building unlike any other Indonesian-related listing in this directory: it was built and is owned not by the Indonesian government or an expatriate association, but by a single South Korean academic. Kim Soo-il, a Busan-born professor of international relations at Busan University of Foreign Studies, served as the Republic of Indonesia's honorary consul in Busan from 1993 to 2007 and financed the building's roughly six-million-dollar construction himself, opening it on April 13, 2012, in a ceremony attended by South Korean lawmakers and Indonesia's then deputy minister of tourism and creative economy.

The building functions as a multi-purpose cultural bridge rather than a single type of venue. Its ground floor houses Kafe Luwak, an Indonesian-themed cafe serving imported Indonesian coffee alongside nasi goreng and mie goreng; the second floor is a gallery space that has hosted rotating exhibitions of Korean and Indonesian art, including shows of Balinese painters; the third floor holds a small reference library on Indonesia; and Indonesian-language classes have been run on the fourth floor on Monday evenings. A guest house occupies the top floor. Indonesian government offices, including tourism-promotion and migrant-worker support functions, have also operated out of the building at various points, though the center itself remains privately owned and run.

The center has drawn high-level Indonesian visitors over the years, including a 2022 visit from Puan Maharani, Speaker of Indonesia's House of Representatives, who used the occasion to encourage greater promotion of Indonesian culture in South Korea along the lines of Korea's own cultural exports. It fills a real gap in the directory: South Korea previously had a restaurant listing in Busan but nothing representing Indonesian art, culture, or language education anywhere in the country outside the diplomatic missions in Seoul.

No public phone number or standard visiting hours could be confirmed for outside visitors, consistent with the center's identity as a privately run cultural and diplomatic-adjacent space rather than a conventional business; both fields are left blank rather than guessed at. Address and history are drawn from Indonesian press coverage (Jawa Pos, reprinted via Universitas Ciputra's library) and corroborating Indonesian news coverage of the 2022 ministerial visit.

Address

Category

Indonesian Art Center in South Korea

More Indonesian Art Center in South Korea

• Gamelan Asmaradana Ltd Singapore, Singapore — Art Center
• Gamelan Kusuma Laras New York, United States — Art Center
• Gamelan Sekar Jaya Berkeley, United States — Art Center
• Het Gamelanhuis Amsterdam, Netherlands — Art Center
• Langen Suka Gamelan Music Inc Sydney, Australia — Art Center
• Otokoba - Studio of Indonesian Gamelan and Dance Tokyo, Japan — Art Center