Gwangju calls itself Korea's city of art, and the claim holds: a municipal art museum older than any other, a biennale founded in 1995, brush shops on Art Street, and painters working out of converted market stalls and hillside houses.
Opened in 1992 as Korea's first municipal art museum, the Jungoe Park building holds over 5,000 works, strongest in Namdo ink painting and the post-1980 minjung realist movement. Tue–Sun 10:00–18:00, shut Mondays.
Five purpose-built halls behind the art museum stage Asia's oldest contemporary art biennale, founded 1995 and now running in even-numbered autumns. Between editions the archive room documents thirty years of curation.
A 500-metre lane of roughly 130 commercial galleries, calligraphy-brush makers, hanji paper merchants and ink-stone dealers, trading here since the 1980s. Saturday's antique flea market draws sellers from across Jeolla.
Korea's oldest surviving single-screen cinema, built in 1935 with 862 seats, hand-painted poster boards and a working 35mm booth. It programmes independent and repertory film daily; tickets run about ₩9,000.
Opened 1978 largely to house the Sinan shipwreck haul: over 20,000 Yuan-dynasty ceramics and 28 tonnes of Chinese coins raised off the Jeolla coast from 1976. Also holds Buddhist bronzes and Joseon literati painting.
Founded 1987 a two-minute walk away, it reconstructs Namdo domestic life: seasonal kimchi rites, gut shamanic ritual objects, and a full diorama of the 1930s Chungjang-ro streetscape that redevelopment later erased.
Built around some 10,000 works donated by Ha Jung-woong, a Zainichi Korean collector born in Japan in 1939. Its holdings of Lee Ufan, Kwak In-sik and other Korean-Japanese artists are rarely shown together elsewhere.
Resident home of the Gwangju Symphony Orchestra and the municipal traditional music orchestra, with a 1,730-seat grand hall plus a small hall for chamber and pansori work. Programmes run most weekday evenings.
American Presbyterians settled this hillside from 1904. The Wilson House of 1920 and neighbouring red-brick homes fuse Western gables and verandas with Korean ondol underfloor heating; Owen Memorial Hall (1914) still hosts recitals.
An alley of junk-turned-art where residents mounted broken clocks, radios and doors on the walls after a fire cleared the lane; the name came from an elderly neighbour's waddling gait. Craft studios fill the far end.
The painter Han Hee-won converted a 1950s Yangnim-dong house into a studio-museum in 2010. Three small rooms hang his dark, heavily worked landscapes of Mudeungsan and of the same alleys visible through the windows.
A shrinking 1950s wholesale market where the city moved some 40 artist studios into empty stalls from 2008. The Byeolbam Dokkaebi night market fills the aisles on Friday and Saturday evenings, March to November.