The exhibit Inside Magritte takes the guests on a journey through surrealist artist René Magritte’s life and art. The curators, who first launched the exhibit in Milan, remarked that they focused on the newly realized significance of Magritte and surrealism in the 21st century. Despite the modern appropriation of Magritte to weird or uncanny visual imagery, Magritte was vocal about his art having no aesthetic value. Instead, he intended for his art to disconcert and reattach the viewer’s reality, and to offer a perspective existing outside consciousness. He toyed with the scale and proportions of familiar objects and bound them in an altogether incomprehensible and disturbing context, which he called a “new vision” — a reality existing nowhere but in his own imagination. It is a space of claustrophobic silence and serene isolation found in one’s own subconscious, or what the curators call a space to “dream awake”. Magritte and other early Surrealists believed that the profoundness of human life was our ability to hear, look and imagine beyond the given everyday reality, and he lends his “new vision” to inspire his viewers to discover and enter their own. The last destination of the exhibit is a visual-auditory e-motion projection of Magritte’s works — a final, grand distortion of Magritte’s subjects. From the exhibit to the immersive space it is displayed in, all of Magritte’s periods are covered; more discomfort and revelation await.

Price: 15,000 won for adults, 13,000 won for teenagers (Age 13-19), 11,000 won for children (Age 7-12)

Opening Hours: 10:00-20:00 from Monday to Sunday (Until September 13)

Location: Insa Central Museum Insa-dong gil 49, Jongno-gu, Seoul