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, indul
