Shipping artwork overseas — export declaration and HS codes

When an overseas exhibition is settled, you need to know how the work will travel, what it will cost, and what has to be prepared. It begins alongside choosing the works, not after them.

Contact a carrier and this is what they ask for: description, HS code, country of origin, quantity, unit price, weight, reason for export. Overseas carriers all ask for the same fields on the invoice.

This entry describes exporting from Korea — Korean customs procedure, Korean filing codes. Every country does this differently. If you are shipping from somewhere else, check your own customs authority.

The carrier will not fill them in for you. The value of the work and the HS code both have to come from the artist. This entry covers those fields, and the procedure from shipping out to bringing the work home.

Exhibition and consignment use different codes

A Korean export declaration has a field called the transaction code — two digits recording the reason the goods are leaving.

If the work is going to be exhibited, it is 85. The full wording is "goods taken out without charge in order to take part in an international event, sporting event, exhibition, trade fair, cultural or artistic performance held abroad." It is long, but exhibition and artistic performance are both inside it.

If instead you are leaving the work with an overseas gallery to sell, that is not an exhibition. That is 31, export of goods for consignment sale.

Neither counts as a taxable supply at the moment of export. But both carry the same note beside the code — if it sells there, it is taxed at that point.

What if you just declare 11, ordinary export? It will go out. But that is a plain commercial export, and when the work comes home the ground for calling it "something that went abroad for a show" is weaker. The code you file at the start decides the procedure when the work comes home.

The transaction code cannot be changed after filing

An export declaration separates fields the declarant may correct on their own from fields they may not. Nineteen fields are excluded from self-correction, and the transaction code is one of them. After loading is complete, changing it is not permitted as a rule.

So it has to be settled before anything is wrapped. Is the work going out to be seen, or to be sold?

You may also worry about an export permit for cultural property. Work made in 1946 or later does not need one. Since 23 July 2024 the Enforcement Decree of the Cultural Heritage Preservation and Utilisation Act defines the relevant category as "made before 1945." Work by a living artist today falls outside it.

Six fields on the export invoice

Description is the English title and the medium. Better to fix it once and leave it. It is what the work is checked against on the way back.

HS code falls under Chapter 97. The first four digits are the heading, the next two the subheading, and Korea adds four more, filing at ten digits.

Know this first: the first six digits are the same worldwide; everything after that differs by country. Korea uses ten digits, the United States also uses ten but with different numbers, and the European Union uses eight. So the export is filed under the Korean code and the import under the receiving country's code. Six digits on the invoice is usually enough — the receiving side adds the rest.

Chapter 97 splits first on whether the work is more than 100 years old. A living artist's work is always in the "other" branch. The Korean ten-digit lines are these.

All of them carry a zero base duty rate. Artwork is not dutiable.

Work more than 100 years old sits under a different subheading — a painting at 9701.21-1000, a sculpture at 9703.10-1000.

You can check the line for your own work on the Korea Customs Service tariff schedule (UNI-PASS) — Section XXI, then Chapter 97, shows exactly the table above. Worth looking once before writing the number down.

Country of origin is Republic of Korea, KR.

Quantity is where people slip. When a work comes apart — a sculpture whose base separates from the body — a mismatch between the invoice quantity and the actual number of packages will stop it at customs.

Declared value is set by the artist. Whether to put it high or low is a real question, and the right answer usually comes from agreeing it with the gallery you are working with. Artwork carries no duty, but some countries do charge above a threshold, and the gallery on the ground knows which.

Insurance is a choice. Some artists take it, some do not.

Courier for small and medium, freight agent for large

Small and medium work can go by DHL or FedEx. With a personal customs clearance code you can ask the carrier to file the export declaration for you. They collect from the studio, so it asks little of you. It costs more.

Oversized work, or anything that needs a wooden crate, cannot go by express carrier. You have to find a firm that handles crating and freight together. Air freight leaves from Incheon, so a company that covers packing, transport and clearance in one place is worth more than a cheaper quote.

Who pays to take the wooden crate away

Ship in a wooden crate to an overseas gallery or buyer and there is a separate cost to collect and dispose of that crate. It varies by country and by gallery.

Best case, the receiving gallery covers it. But it is sometimes billed back to the sender.

So settle this with the gallery before anything ships. Who unpacks, who removes the empty crate, and who pays for it. It is easy to discuss only the price and the dates, miss this item, and meet it again on an invoice.

Coming the other way the terms differ again. A freight agent's contract usually covers delivery into the country and no further. Carrying the crate to your studio, and breaking it down and taking it away, sit outside it. Ask for them and the cost can fall entirely on the artist.

When a quote arrives, read line by line for where it stops. "Arrival in Korea" and "delivery to the studio" are not the same thing.

Filing the export yourself, or asking the carrier

You can register with the Korea Customs Service's UNI-PASS as an individual or a business and file the declaration yourself with your personal customs code, uploading an invoice and a packing list.

If that is too much, ask the carrier. The sentence to give them is this.

I am an individual artist. This is not a sale — it is going abroad for an exhibition, and unsold work will be brought back to Korea afterwards.

Hand over the title, dimensions, quantity, declared value, HS code, country of origin and consignee details, and they will walk you through the waybill and invoice. But the carrier will not decide the value or the HS code on your behalf. That information has to be accurate, and it has to come from you.

And if neither route feels safe, consult a licensed customs broker, or appoint one to handle clearance. There is a fee, but it is less than the storage charges that follow a wrong code. For a first shipment, or a high-value work, it is worth it.

When a platform sells your work: what to hand over, what to ask for

When a work sells on an overseas platform, the platform books the shipping. Pack it to their specification and the carrier arrives on schedule.

Here is what matters. If you say nothing, the export declaration is simply skipped.

Two things to hand to the carrier:

1. Three copies of the invoice
2. The HS code

And one thing you have to say out loud:

Please file the export declaration.

That one is not a document, it is a request. Even when the platform arranges the whole shipment, the export declaration is not included by default. Say nothing and the work simply leaves.

A platform sale is declared at the price it sold for, so for a work that sold at a high price it is worth having the export on record.

Photographs of the work itself

Sometimes you have to prove that what you are sending is a work of art. That is why carriers ask for photographs of the work, and when they ask, you have to supply them.

Overseas carriers use an art-export form that asks for the artist's name, English title, year, a description of the work, and photographs of it. The photographs are one of the fields on that form.

• Front — the whole work, nothing cropped
• Side — so depth and thickness read
• Back — the verso of a canvas, the underside of a base
• Signature — close enough to read
• Before wrapping — how the work sits in the packing

Sculpture in particular needs front, side and signature together. A single photograph does not explain a three-dimensional object.

Photographing on request means unwrapping the work and taking it out again. Do it before it is packed.

Packing photographs: a ruler, and no more than five

These serve a different purpose. The photographs above prove it is artwork; these are the record of size and condition.

Once collection is booked, finish the packing and photograph it.

• Height, width and depth with a ruler held so the numbers are readable
• The condition of the packing itself
• No more than five frames

Email them to the carrier. With these on file, disputes about dimensions or damage mostly do not happen.

Bringing unsold work back into Korea

When the show ends and unsold work returns to Korea, you declare it against the invoice from the original export — the same values, the same line items — and submit a statement of reason for re-entry after exhibition to the customs broker.

There is law behind this. Article 99 of the Customs Act allows duty to be waived on goods exported from Korea and re-imported within two years of the export being accepted, provided they were not manufactured, processed, repaired or used abroad. Article 54(1) of the Enforcement Rules lists goods exhibited or used at trade fairs, exhibitions, shows and international competitions separately.

If you shipped without an export declaration

The last entry promised to cover what happens when you do not declare.

The short answer is that it still comes in. If there was no export declaration, or the value going out does not match the value coming back, the re-import relief does not apply and the work is declared instead as a general import of artwork. And because artwork carries a zero duty rate, an unsold painting or sculpture still arrives with no duty to pay.

What increases is paperwork. Customs may ask for the invoice to be amended, or for further explanation. More statements, more time.

One thing matters here. Stay in contact with the Korean freight agent and answer whatever customs asks for, immediately. If a request sits unanswered, the work goes into a bonded warehouse — and once it is in the warehouse, storage charges start.

There is no duty on artwork, but there are storage fees. That is where money actually leaves. All of it avoidable by getting the first declaration right.

Work sold abroad is declared at home

The overseas platforms say so themselves: if work sold abroad, declare it at home. They say that much and leave the rest to the artist.

But it is not something anyone leaves to you. A sale abroad is still income earned by you in Korea, and whether or not you hold a business registration, filing it is your own obligation.

The note beside codes 85 and 31 — taxed if sold there — says the same thing. Not a taxable supply when it ships; taxable the moment it sells.

Once the amounts grow, talk to an accountant.

With an artwork record it takes ten minutes

Look again at the six fields on the invoice. Description, HS code, country of origin, quantity, unit price, weight.

Not one of those is something an artwork record could do without.

With a record it takes ten minutes. Without one, the work comes out of storage to be measured again, photographed again, and given an English title on the spot. That hastily chosen name then sits in the paperwork, and nothing matches when the work comes home.

This is why the first entry in this series was about the artist's archive. You build an archive to keep a record of the work, and that record is what you use when the work goes abroad.

Next

Next is packing: what to wrap it in, when a wooden crate becomes necessary, and what the platforms actually require.