WOO KUKWON, Exhibition Museo Hendrik Christian Andersen, Rome

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WOO KUKWON:

The black humor of fairy tales

From 25 January to 2 March 2025

Museo Hendrik Christian Andersen

Via Pasquale Stanislao Mancini, 20, Rome

Closed now: open at 09:30

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From January 25th to March 2nd, the Hendrik Christian Andersen House Museum, directed by Maria Giuseppina Di Monte and belonging to the Pantheon and Castel Sant'Angelo Institute - National Museums Directorate of the city of Rome, will host the solo exhibition of WOO KUKWON. The black humor of fairy tales. The exhibition, curated by Maria Giuseppina Di Monte and Giuliana Benassi, is realized in collaboration with the Korean Cultural Institute and the Embassy of the Republic of Korea. The artist Woo Kukwon's exhibition is ideally connected to the previous one held at the Hendrik Andersen House Museum in June 2024 titled Traveling for 140 years to celebrate the anniversary of diplomatic relations between Italy and the Republic of Korea. The museum rooms now host the works of Woo Kukwon, an artist born and residing in Seoul but very active internationally. His large-scale oil paintings are inspired by the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, reinterpreted in an oriental key and set in the fantastic and dreamlike scenarios of the Far East. Woo Kukwon's representations, inspired by the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, namesake of our Hendrik Christian, although very different formally, can be traced back to that specific aspect of the fairy tale whose plot, told with sometimes light tones and generally synthetic, always has a climax as well as an iconic structure that characterizes it, immediately allowing to grasp the message in its almost dogmatic essentiality. The reasons that led to organizing this exhibition, which once again sees the institutional involvement of the Embassy of the Republic of Korea in Rome and the Korean Cultural Institute, are not so evident at first glance, but upon closer analysis, it is understood how the reading of Hans Christian's fairy tales contributed to influencing Hendrik Andersen, who, like his brother Andreas and his sister-in-law Olivia, loved to indulge in illustrating fairy tales in his small and precious travel and note notebooks. The fairy tale, especially the illustrated one, which has its roots in a glorious past, has always fascinated Hendrik, as well as Olivia and Andreas, who paid particular attention to this singular medium that condenses writing (poetry) and image, offering in the many sketches and drawings present in the collection a critical and reflective look at the society and customs of the time. In this collective imaginary, fits the research of Woo Kukwon who reworks the fairy tale content to transform it into his personal language introducing us to another, fantastic and dreamy dimension, distant in many ways from our tradition but equally universal and fascinating.

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	opens - closes	last entry
monday	Closed now
tuesday	09:30 - 19:30	18:45
wednesday	09:30 - 19:30	18:45
thursday	09:30 - 19:30	18:45
friday	09:30 - 19:30	18:45
saturday	09:30 - 19:30	18:45
sunday	09:30 - 19:30	18:45

WOO KUKWON:

The black humor of fairy tales

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