Jeju Museum of Art

Spacious outdoor gallery and front view of Jeju Museum of Art

Jeju Museum of Art

Wide view of the building

Concrete Board at the entrance

Outdoor Gallery

Jeju Museum of Art caught my attention as I left Loveland Park, the location right beside it. As a great fan of artworks, I did not hesitate to explore the museum with much gusto.

Jeju Museum of Art was established in 2009 to create a flagship cultural center on Jeju Island.

On its over 7,000 square meters of floor space, the museum comprises exhibition halls, performance spaces, educational facilities, and relevant facilities that cater to its purpose.

The museum aims to open and link with the broader world of arts, including modern and contemporary arts from local and international artists.

Jeju Museum has both permanent and temporary exhibitions. They also aim to organize more collections and various art events throughout each year.

Besides the exhibition halls inside, the museum exhibits permanent outside gallery on its spacious outdoor gardens.

It is considered that Jeju Art is the epicenter of the local culture's life; its colors and sound reflect its past and present life.

One of its permanent exhibitions, the Chang Ree-suok Hall, displays over a hundred artworks. Chang Ree-suok, a local artist, donated his works for this museum in support of its visions.

One of Chang Rhee-suok's paintings

Work of Arts & Artists

Please, see below some artworks which are on exhibition during my visit. Let me describe a couple of artists and their works here.

Oh Yunseon (1962-present)
Oh continues her work on themes related to Jeju Island's history. Her artworks use metaphors that project Jeju's painful past.

"Through <Gundpoint of a Stone Fortress>, using a montage of contemporary newspapers, she evokes a dark historic site that is being forgotten by expanding the gunpoint of a stone fortress built as a checkpoint during 4.3 Uprising. In the shape of a bent and broken saserepi tree, <Saserepi-Fracture> seems to metaphorically express the lives of the Jeju people who lived through this time of turbulence and hardship."

Saserepi Tree artwork

Haenyeo (Woman scuba divers on Jeju Island)

Kang Si-gweon (1961-present) is a sculpture who is doing art on the human body. He has been sculpting various human images and reproduced it realistically in real human relationships. He is also been creating abstract arts using geometric shapes.

<Thawing Age-1999 Time Capsule> is a work metaphorically expressing the materialism of contemporary society and the loss of humanity by arranging a sitting figure in agony with a broken sandglass, various signs, and barcodes. With this work, he received the excellence award at the 18th Korea Grand Art Exhibition in 1999.

Thawing Age - 1999 Time Capsule

Koh Seung-wook
Koh is a local of Seogwipo who finished a degree from the Department of Painting at Hongik University.

His works are on photography, video art, and other performances that focus on the human body, labor, memory, life, and leisure that are distorted by power and consumerism by society.

"<Scape> is a performance photograph in which he attempts to virtually encounter victimized beings by exploring sites of civilian massacre due to state violence from 2015. The title refers to the underlying landscape of Korean society where memories and oblivion affirmation and denial, and hope and despair intersect."

Sculptures at Jeju Museum

Useful Information

1330 Travel Hotline: +82-2-1330 (Korean, English, Japanese, Chinese)
Inquiry: +82-64-710-4300

Operation Days/Hours:
Open: Tuesday to Sunday, 9-6 PM
Closed: Mondays, New Year, Lunar New Year (Seollal), Chuseok (Korean Thanksgiving Day)

Entrance Fees:
Adult: (Individual) 1,000 KRW; Group: 7000 KRW
Youth: (Individual) 500 KRW; group: 300 KRW
Child: 300 KRW

Art works at the terrace on the second floor of Jeju Art Museum

Getting to Jeju Museum of Art

You may take public transportation to get here. Please, see the details as follow:

By Bus
From Jeju International Airport, take Bus #500 or 200 and then get off at Sinjeju Rotary Bus Stop.

Then transfer to Bus #46 and get off right at the museum's bus stop. It takes around 40 minutes to get here from the airport (a total of 16 stops).

By Taxi
Hop into a taxi from anywhere on the island. Ensure that you have the right address to show to the driver (preferably in the Korean language).