Opening to the public on Saturday, May 17th, Adapted Sceneries, an exhibition organized by MAO Museum of Oriental Art in Turin in collaboration with the Gwangju Museum of Art (Korea) dedicated to Korean landscape painting (sansuhwa) and works inspired by the May 18 Democratization Movement.

The event is part of the Cultural City Gwangju 2025 project and the collaboration agreement between the city of Gwangju and the city of Turin signed in 2024.

Since 2015, the Gwangju Museum of Art has been promoting the art of Gwangju and the Jeollanam-do region internationally, collaborating with overseas institutions under the auspices of the Cultural City Gwangju project.

Adapted Sceneries offers a significant opportunity to introduce the artistic tradition and history of Gwangju and Jeollanam-do to the Italian public through collaboration with the MAO of Turin, a city known for its cultural vibrancy and, like Gwangju, nicknamed the City of Art, valuing culture as a key element of its identity.

Set up on the second floor of the permanent collections and in the exhibition area called t-space on the ground floor, Adapted Sceneries offers an in-depth look at the Namjonghwa painting (Southern School of painting), a fundamental genre in Korean art history, along with contemporary reinterpretations of traditional painting. Among the exhibited works, those of Heo Ryeon, Heo Baekryeon and Heo Haengmyeon highlight the aesthetic sensitivity of classical Korean painting, while the works of Lee Sunbok, Heo Dalyong and Hong Sungmin demonstrate the evolution of Korean pictorial language through a dialogue between tradition and modernity.