Gwangyang City Recommends 'Art & Local Travel' in Everyday Life

Experience Artistic Sensibility at Jeonnam Provincial Art Museum and Gwangyang Art Warehouse
Recharge Your Energy at the Warm and Friendly Gwangyang 5-Day Market

Gwangyang City in Jeollanam-do has proposed an everyday art & local Gwangyang trip, where visitors can cultivate their artistic sensibility at an art museum and recharge their vitality at the nearby 5-day market.

In the old downtown of Gwangyang, which is emerging as a city of tourism and culture, the Jeonnam Museum of Art and the Gwangyang Art Warehouse, both transformed from an abandoned station and warehouse, stand facing each other to provide a comfortable and emotionally rich cultural space.

Jeonnam Provincial Museum of Art and Gwangyang Art Warehouse exterior view.

Near the museum, there is the Gwangyang Terminal and the historic Yudang Park, and across the crosswalk lies the warm and friendly Gwangyang 5-day Market, which opens every five days on the 1st, 6th, and so on.

The Jeonnam Museum of Art was built on the site of the old Gwangyang Station, once bustling with people coming and going. It continues to attract visitors with a series of well-organized and high-quality exhibitions. Currently, exhibitions such as "Ojiho and Impressionism: From the Vibrancy of Light to Color," "Landscape Becomes the Future: Miguel Chevalier, Lee Lee-nam," and "Poetic Abstraction" are being held.

In anticipation of the 120th anniversary of Ojiho's birth in 2025, the "Ojiho and Impressionism" exhibition, co-organized with the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, comprehensively showcases the artist's life with over 100 paintings, archives, and personal belongings.

In the lobby, there is also a VR experience center where visitors can interactively appreciate the artistic worlds of Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh, representative figures of Impressionism, in connection with the "Ojiho and Impressionism" exhibition.

In the "Landscape Becomes the Future: Miguel Chevalier, Lee Lee-nam" exhibition, two leading media artists from France and Korea reinterpret the nature of the future, transcending East and West, past and present.

Miguel Chevalier presents a poetic and metaphorical paradise from the perspective of the "coexistence" of real and technological nature, while Lee Lee-nam unfolds a new dimension of landscape that fuses analog and digital based on traditional Korean landscape painting.

The Gwangyang Art Warehouse is a barrier-free complex cultural space where visitors can experience culture and art as naturally as air. It features an archive where visitors can view works by the master of documentary photography, Lee Kyungmo, via touchscreen, as well as media art and a caf?.

Upon leaving the museum, the serene Yudang Park, which holds a gentle history, expresses the aesthetics of emptiness. Crossing the street again, the lively Gwangyang 5-day Market, held every five days on the 1st and 6th, is bustling with energy.

At the 5-day market, where it seems the whole mountain and field have come together, visitors can purchase seasonal specialties of Gwangyang such as persimmons and mature pumpkins at affordable local prices.

A variety of foods, including steaming hot freshly steamed dumplings, crispy fried snacks, and banquet noodles with rich and mild broth, stimulate the senses of visitors at every moment.

The Gwangyang 5-day Market is charming and abundant, so much so that children's book author Jung Chaebong, known as the Andersen of Korea, used to walk the 12-kilometer journey hand in hand with his grandmother as a child.

Kim Seongsu, head of the Tourism Division, said, "The Jeonnam Museum of Art, Gwangyang Art Warehouse, Gwangyang Yudang Park, and Gwangyang 5-day Market are all located near Gwangyang Terminal, making them highly accessible. They form a complex cultural space where visitors can recharge with culture, art, relaxation, and the vitality of life all in one place." He added, "Since this Saturday, the 21st, is a market day at Gwangyang 5-day Market, I recommend a rich Gwangyang trip where you can enjoy masterpieces and shop at the same time."

Meanwhile, the alleys of Gwangyang-eup are filled with attractions where visitors can discover traces of history, such as the Gwangyang History and Culture Museum, Inseori Park, and the Seoul National University Southern Experimental Forest Residence, making it a great place for a leisurely stroll.