Wealth is worth? Questioning the immigrant experience

Garnering yet more awards, TV series Beef expertly explores identities. Krish Kandiah revisits the K-wave drama.

Krish Kandiah

Krish is a social entrepreneur partnering across civil society, faith communities, government and philanthropy. He founded The Sanctuary Foundation.

in a dim room a couple stand off against each other.

Steven Yeun and Ali Wong play Daniel and Amy.

Not since the ground-breaking series Breaking Bad can I remember such a captivating opening sequence. A road rage incident escalates. And escalates. And escalates. Just when you think things can’t get any worse in this dark Netflix comedy, the vicious consequences of the feud unravels further. I couldn’t stop watching, and soon Beef had me firmly dragged into the world of two protagonists, who may have had very different experiences of the Korean American dream but were more alike than they would ever dare to admit.

I am a huge fan of the global Korean cultural renaissance known as the K-wave. For me it started with Psy, the breakout Korean singing superstar hitting number one in the UK charts with Gangnam Style in 2012. Then there was BTS, the Korean Take That equivalent, who duetted with Coldplay and became the best-selling band in the world. Parasite was a remarkable movie, that grabbed multiple awards at the Academy Awards of 2020. Squid Game took the concepts of battle royale and Hunger Games to a whole new level and became a Netflix number one global download hit in 2021. Throughout the K-wave decade I have also been an ardent devotee of Samsung, the biggest brand in mobile phone innovation.

Something important is happening with the global recognition of Korean culture. Beef represents another step forward showcasing the Korean diaspora cultural ascendence. At this year’s Emmy Awards it is the third most nominations. It follows on from the Canadian comedy series Mr Kim, which offered an affectionate and amusing exploration of the experience of a second-generation Korean family coming to terms with life in Toronto. Beef similarly presents the US-Korean cultural experience without explanation or apology. It is powerfully assumed that this is legitimate and normal. There is no embarrassment, no exposition: just a cultural and narrative world that the viewer has to catch up with as soon as possible before they miss something.

Beef is Korean and American. It is a comedy and a tragedy. It is also, ultimately, a morality and immorality play. It explores three main issues: anger, identity and aspiration and how they interact with one another – for good and for evil.

But the rage runs deep. It is toxic to everyone it touches. What can break its power?

The instigating event in the show is a road rage incident between Daniel, a second-generation Korean immigrant to the US whose family faced financial ruin when a relative used their motel for illegal activity, and Amy, also a second-generation Korean immigrant, who is on the cusp of banking a multi-million dollar deal. Everything Daniel attempts he fails at. He can’t even manage to successfully end his own life, or even return the faulty suicide equipment to the hardware store he bought it from. Amy, despite outward appearances is also struggling. She is estranged from her parents, stuck in a superficial relationship with her husband, and dealing with a demanding and dismissive mother-in-law and a daughter she hardly sees. The near miss in the car park comes at a pivotal moment for both of these strangers and flips a switch in them that they cannot let go.

The feud escalates between Amy and Daniel with increasingly high stakes and terrible consequences. The more we get to know about our two protagonists the more we understand why they have reacted in the extreme ways they have and how much they both have to lose. I found myself watching through my fingers as I was invested in the characters and was longing for some kind of forgiveness, repentance or reconciliation. At some points faith seemed tantalisingly close to providing an antidote to the beef, holding out hope even in the very last episode. At other points it seemed that love would find a way to stop the tide of anger and revenge. But the rage runs deep. It is toxic to everyone it touches. What can break its power?

If the church were to face up to its own identity issues, perhaps it could be of more help to individuals who brush shoulders with it.

The more we are drawn into the lives of Amy and Daniel, the more we realise that they are both wrestling with major issues of identity. Daniel is seemingly willing to go to any lengths to win the approval of his parents while also clinging so tightly to his brother that he stifles him. Amy too wrestles with a series of strained relationships. Both are lonely, feel unseen and misunderstood. They both carry dark secrets. They both are crippled by feelings of worthlessness and guilt. Amy’s sexual intimacy is inhibited by the sense of betrayal that was caused by her father’s infidelity. Daniel’s work quality is compromised because of the weight of despair and shame. While they both present to the world as successful and strong, inside they experience anxiety, purposelessness and anger.

Beef therefore provides a powerful exploration of identity issues. Male and female, rich and poor, married and single - no-one is exempt from the struggles of knowing who we are and where we fit in. There are moments in the series where the church looks like it has the answer. Going to church is normalised in the show as part of the Korean experience, which appears to be a culturally confident move. But the church is shown to be struggling with its own identity crisis. It accurately portrays the experience of ethnic-specific churches in the West. Yet despite being made up of diaspora communities, more often than not their liturgies, governance structures and forms and language of worship, are based on white western norms. The Korean cultural renaissance has not worked its way into our expression of faith yet. If the church were to face up to its own identity issues, perhaps it could be of more help to individuals who brush shoulders with it.

Beef offers a challenge to the prevailing aspirational culture often normalised by immigrant communities – if you work hard enough you can succeed.

What Dan and Amy have in common is their belief that value or worth in the world comes through the amount of money they have access to. They both graft and strive and lie and steal in order to gain the economic success their parents failed to achieve. Their competitiveness at work spills over into a drive to win at all costs. Riches is righteousness. Financial security is salvation. Wealth is worth. Annihilating the competition is victory. Yet the wealthy people in the show all come to realise the truth of what Jesus taught: “what good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?”

Daniel is clearly faced with this choice right at the beginning of the series. He is at church when the words of a song seem to move him:

“Have you come to the end of yourself?

Jesus is calling.

Come to the Altar…”

This opportunity for a new start is juxtaposed with another. Daniel notices a possibility of ripping the church off financially, luring an ex-girlfriend back and replacing the worship leader. The church becomes the place where he can renounce or receive money, sex and power. He chooses the latter – to his own ultimate downfall.

As a second-generation immigrant, I was told that if I did well at school and set my sights on becoming a doctor or lawyer, then I could earn my place in the world. Qualifications could silence the xenophobes, money could buy me relationships and success could secure my future. Beef offers a challenge to this prevailing aspirational culture so often normalised by immigrant communities – if you work hard enough you can succeed. My Christian faith has changed that perspective for me. It showed me that financial gain was mono-dimensional, that chasing fool’s gold was a fool’s errand. Beef comes to the same conclusion, albeit with stronger language and adult themes. It takes a swipe at the hard- and cold-hearted calculus of personal aspiration, challenges consumptive materialism on its hollowed-out version of life and leaves it in the middle of nowhere to die.

Review

Art

Awe and wonder

Culture

16 July 2025

5 min read

This gallery refresh adds drama to the story of art

Rehanging the Sainsbury Wing revives the emotion of great art

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

An art gallery arch reveals a suspended crucifix and other paintings in a distant room

The Sainsbury Wing interior.

The Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery has recently reopened after closure for two years for building works. There was controversy over the designs for the Sainsbury Wing in the planning stage but its use, once built, to tell the story of the early stages in the development of Western art was widely welcomed and appreciated.

The story that it told is essentially the story of Christian art and so the reopening of the Sainsbury Wing together with the rehanging of the National Gallery’s collection provides an opportunity to review that story. As a result of the completed work over 1,000 works of art - a larger proportion of the collection than has been previously displayed - trace the development of painting in the Western European tradition from the 13th to the 20th centuries from beloved favourites to paintings never previously seen in the National Gallery.

The Sainsbury Wing features works from the medieval and Renaissance periods. Painting came of age during this time. It moved from manuscript illumination to images on panel and canvas, overtaking metalwork, tapestry and sculpture as the most popular and prestigious art form in Europe.

An opening room contains works from the 14th to the 16th centuries, including The Wilton Diptych and Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Virgin of the Rocks, which together ask visitors to consider the full spectrum of what painting can do. This introductory room gives a sense of what these paintings were for and how they were used. Painting’s rise in status was due to all the things it can do such as tell complex stories, convey human emotions, fool the eye, capture a likeness, make viewers laugh, weep, pray and think. This room provides a sample of those achievements and the various functions painting fulfilled.

Throughout the Sainsbury Wing, new display cases are used to show paintings as objects viewed from all sides, not simply as flat panels on walls. Medieval altarpieces often had winged panels that could be opened or closed depending on the season or occasion. An example is included here to show how such hinged panels were used.

From this introductory room spanning the period, visitors can follow either a Northern European route or Italian route around the space, enabling influences between both to be highlighted. The key change explored on both routes is that artists in this period began to create a convincing illusion of reality in their paintings.

The earliest paintings in the National Gallery Collection were made in central Italy nearly 800 years ago. These naturalistic and intimate images of love, grief and suffering responded to a new interest in the humanity of Christ. A chapel-like space is entirely dedicated to Piero della Francesca whose work, with its cool colour palette and keen sense of space and light, possesses a dignified solemnity. Another room focuses on the spiritual power of gold-ground scenes of devotion, exploring the way gold in paintings was used to evoke the timeless, spiritual significance of Christ, the Virgin and saints, and set these holy figures apart from our world.

The galleries in the Sainsbury Wing were designed to evoke, for visitors, a Renaissance Basilica. Its architectural features make it possible to display paintings in a similar way to how they would have originally been encountered. The central galleries form the nave of the basilica and all the altarpieces displayed are now there. These galleries are devoted to works made in Florence, Venice, and Siena. The early Florentine room represents the principal point of departure for this new art. In the Venetian room we see the development of perspective, while the Siena room resembles a side chapel in the basilica.

An altarpiece made for the church of San Pier Maggiore in Florence by Jacopo di Cione and his workshop has been reconstructed and sits on an altar-like plinth to evoke the view of it originally seen by worshippers. Predella panels by Fra Angelico are displayed in a case in front of this altarpiece giving an indication of the way in which predellas interacted with a larger, grander altarpiece. The positioning of these two works also illustrates the movement in terms of realism found in the paintings of this period. The Ascension scene on the altarpiece depicts a statue-like ascended Christ while Fra Angelico’s resurrected Christ in the predella is more realistically floating in the air.

In a first for the National Gallery, Segna di Bonaventura’s Crucifix is visible down the central spine of the Sainsbury Wing, suspended from the ceiling. This enables today’s audiences to view the work in the way it would have been seen in the 14th century. Painted crucifixes were common in 13th- and 14th-century Italian churches, often displayed high-up like this one. Rood screens on which such crucifixes were originally placed were often destroyed in the Counter Reformation, which led to crucifix’s then being hung from the ceiling, as is the case here.

The rehang also presents several works back on display after long-term conservation projects. The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian by Antonio del Pollaiuolo and Piero del Pollaiuolo is back on show after nearly three years of conservation and scientific examination.

The rehang of The Sainsbury Wing brings to life the way artists forged a new way of painting, painting with a drama that no one had seen before.

Despite the religious and political upheaval caused by the Reformation, the arts also flourished in Northern Europe during this time. Prints transformed the exchange of artistic ideas. Christians were encouraged to use images as a focus for meditation on the lives of Christ and the saints and paintings that were meant to be handled and examined close-up were created for the private devotion of members of religious orders and laypeople. Albrecht Dürer and Lucas Cranach were key figures, with Dürer’s prints, portraits, altarpieces and non-religious subjects transforming painting both in the Holy Roman Empire and beyond.

Christianity became the predominant power shaping European culture after classical antiquity, inspiring artists and patrons to evoke the nature of sacred mysteries in visual terms. The rehang of The Sainsbury Wing brings to life the way artists forged a new way of painting, painting with a drama that no one had seen before and with stories flowing across panels in colourful scenes. These displays also promote a greater understanding of how works of art were, and still are, used as models of moral behaviour, as celebrations of the deeds of holy figures or as a plea for one’s hopes, both in this life and in the afterlife.

Support Seen & Unseen

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,500 articles. All for free.
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief

Pledge now