Woo Kukwon. The Black Humor of Fairy Tales

The Hendrik Christian Andersen House Museum hosts the solo exhibition of the Korean artist Woo Kukwon entitled Woo Kukwon. The black humor of fairy tales. The exhibition, curated by Maria Giuseppina Di Monte and Giuliana Benassi, is organized in collaboration with the Korean Cultural Institute and the Embassy of the Republic of Korea.

The works on display by Woo Kukwon, an artist born and resident in Seoul but very active internationally, are large-scale oils on canvas inspired by the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, reinterpreted in an oriental key and set in the fantastic and dreamlike settings of the Far East. The Korean artist, in fact, uses a narrative through images in his canvases that gives us a stylised, almost illustrative vision of that Orient that is still somehow magical, distant and full of symbols for us Westerners, through references to the xylographies of the Japanese artist of the Edo period Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849); in particular to the famous Fugaku Sanjūrokkei (Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji) created between 1830 and 1833. Wookukwon draws in fact particular inspiration from Hokusai, accentuating his fairy-tale and poetic aspects.

The fairy tale, especially the illustrated one, which has its roots in a very distant past, made of oral tradition, has always exercised a great fascination for the artist and sculptor Hendrik Andersen who, like his brother Andreas and his sister-in-law Olivia, loved to dabble in illustrating fairy tales in his small travel and notepads. The research of Woo Kukwon fits into this imaginary world, reworking the fairy tale content to transform it into his personal and original language.

Finally, we recall that the exhibition is ideally connected to the previous one held at the House Museum in June 2024 entitled Travelling for 140 years, to celebrate the anniversary of diplomatic relations between Italy and the Republic of Korea.

Photo credits: official poster of the exhibition