The Jeonbuk Provincial Museum of Art (Director Lee Ae-seon) will hold the 2026 Jeonbuk Art History Research Series, 'Jeon Su-cheon: Someday a Giant Will Come,' starting from the 13th of this month, to shed light on the artistic world of Jeon Su-cheon (1947-2018), an artist from Jeongeup.

The 'Jeonbuk Art History Research Series,' which began in 2021, has been discovering and establishing the value of regional art. This exhibition goes beyond the traditional and regional-based research of the past, seeking to expand materials and media while still posing relevant questions for the times, focusing on the artist Jeon Su-cheon, who hails from Jeongeup.

Jeon Su-cheon, a professor at the Korea National University of Arts from 1992 to 2011, is well-known for receiving the Special Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1995 when the Korean Pavilion was opened. His Amtrak Project, which crossed the American continent for 7 days and 8 nights in 2005, is another notable work. However, beyond that, his experimental endeavors transcending genres such as painting, sculpture, video, installation, and performance have broadened the horizon of Korean contemporary art. He continued to maintain a critical perspective and questioning gaze towards the era based on his own cultural context.

The exhibition is divided into four axes: nature, civilization, society (capital), and human. Visitors can directly encounter major works that penetrate the era, such as 'The Spirit of a Korean in the Wandering Planets' (1995), which collided past spirituality with modern material civilization, 'Moving Drawing' (2005), which used the American continent as a canvas, the 'Barcode' series that confronts capitalist society, and paintings exploring the inner and external conditions of worn-out humans.

The title of the exhibition, 'Someday a Giant Will Come,' was borrowed from Jeon Su-cheon's 1987 painting, embodying his artistic attitude that was closer to questions than definitive messages, as well as a temporal and existential awareness that permeates his entire body of work. Particularly, the 'giant' referred to in the exhibition does not represent an external savior but rather signifies our future selves who have achieved existential awareness without being submerged in the systems of capital and civilization. The exhibition aims to go beyond asking 'What did Jeon Su-cheon do?' to focusing on 'What did he shake up?' and reconfirming what valid power the questions he left behind hold in today's context.

Despite his intense consciousness of issues, artist Jeon Su-cheon left a statement saying, "I look at the world very positively, that is my basic spirit and root." The museum expressed hope that this exhibition, like the artist's perspective that did not lose the affirmation of human dignity amidst the civilization crisis, would be a time to awaken the dormant giants within the visitors.

Furthermore, the '2025 New Collection Exhibition' will also be held until April 19th. The Jeonbuk Provincial Museum of Art collected 58 donated and 26 purchased new collection items with the goal of achieving a balance between administrative transparency and academic expertise by 2025, and will hold a collection report exhibition in five galleries.