Seoul

The fastest-moving culture city on this list: a national museum that costs almost nothing, private collections funded by industry and a live scene that exports itself.

Seoul spent thirty years building cultural infrastructure at a speed nobody else attempted, and the last decade turning it outward. The National Museum of Korea charges nothing for its permanent collection and holds it in a building the length of an airport terminal. The five royal palaces sit in the middle of the business district, free on the days when visitors wear hanbok, and the modern art museum has a branch inside a palace compound.

The private money built the rest. Leeum, funded by an industrial family, put traditional and contemporary Korean art in three buildings by three different architects. When Frieze launched a Seoul edition, the market followed within two seasons, and the galleries of Hannam and Samcheong now programme against London rather than against each other.

The live scene is the part that travels. The rooms of Hongdae feed an export industry that the rest of the world consumes as finished product, and seeing it upstream, in a basement that holds two hundred people with a crowd that knows the lyrics, is a different experience entirely.