Museum SAN (뮤지엄 산)

In 2005 the Hansol Cultural Foundation (한솔문화재단) decided to build a museum. It was to bring together the paper museum, in operation since 1997, and the Cheongjo art gallery (청조 갤러리), opened in 2013. The starting point was a private collection, which the foundation wanted to offer to the public as cultural heritage.

That same year Tadao Ando visited the site. He took away the impression of "a cozy feeling surrounded by beautiful mountains and nature, away from the bustle of the city". He recounts that this long, narrow summit, as if shaved flat, made him think a world apart could be created there; that he did not want a museum that was merely a quiet box, but a place where children could run and shout in nature and draw from it "the strength to live"; and that, despite his doubts about whether visitors would come so far from Seoul, he agreed to design the museum, moved by the appeal of the site and by the intense wish of senior advisor Lee In-hee (이인희) to show as many people as possible the art collection she had been building for more than thirty years. He wanted to make a museum of the whole site, not only of the building.

Eight years later the museum opened in May 2013 as the Hansol Museum; it became Museum SAN (Space Art Nature) in 2014. Ando then added a meditation hall for the fifth anniversary of the opening (2019), the Space of Light pavilion, conceived on the occasion of the Youth exhibition in 2023, and GROUND (2025), made with the British sculptor Antony Gormley.

Museum SAN is not a single building but a 700 m route that adapts to the particular topography known as "Sansang" (산상, "on the mountain"). It leads from the Welcome Center to the flower garden, the water garden, the main building, the meditation hall, the stone garden and the James Turrell hall. The car park and Welcome Center are ringed by a circular wall of natural stone, Paju stone, which also encloses the main building.

In the water garden, the main building seems to float. Haemi stones lie beneath the water, and Archway, a red sculpture by Alexander Liberman, welcomes visitors before the building.

The main building joins four wings through square, triangular and circular spaces, in which Ando expresses his idea of linking earth, sky and people. Its principle is a box within a box (Box in Box): inside, a box of exposed concrete is placed within a box of Paju stone. Small high openings between the stone walls and the eaves let in sunlight that warms the corridors. The windows of the corridors between the galleries frame the beauty of the four seasons, curated by nature. The square, triangular and circular spaces between the galleries are voids that symbolise the Heaven-Earth-Human idea and serve as places to rest.

The stone garden, inspired by the ancient tombs of Silla, is made of nine stone mounds with gentle curves, with a walking path that runs past sculptures by foreign artists. Next to it, the meditation hall (2019) is a dome designed to harmonise with this garden; its windows take in the light and landscape as they change from moment to moment.

Imagined by Ando in the sculpture garden as the museum's second meditation space, the Space of Light pavilion takes Platonic solids as its motif, with light emphasising their symmetry. It is a square volume with an exposed-concrete interior; its roof is cut by cross-shaped slits left open to the air, without glazing. Ando says that in the Space of Light the light comes straight down from the sky, as it does in the Pantheon in Rome.

GROUND (2025), designed with Antony Gormley, is a cave-like underground structure beneath the flower garden; its entrance, to the east, faces the great mountain range of Wonju. The underground space is 25 m across and continues into an outdoor garden. GROUND is both an exhibition space and a work of art: the sunlight through the window in the ceiling, the wind from the entrance and the distant rustle of leaves are part of the work and of the architecture.

The paper museum begins with a papyrus greenhouse, in an outdoor space that takes up the idea of a courtyard seen in Sumiyoshi House (住吉の長屋), one of Ando's representative works: visitors can observe papyrus there, a writing material from before paper.

The main building houses two galleries. The Paper Gallery, successor to the paper museum opened in 1997, has three halls: the first runs from writing materials before paper to the birth of paper, its spread to the West and the techniques of traditional Korean paper (hanji); the second shows paper crafts; the third brings together old books and documents from the museum's collection. The Cheongjo Gallery shows the course of modern and contemporary Korean art, with temporary exhibitions and a permanent display.

In the gardens, the sculpture garden includes works by Joel Shapiro, among others, and the stone garden sculptures by foreign artists. The James Turrell hall shows five works by the artist of light and space: Skyspace, Space Division, Horizon Room, Ganzfeld and Wedgework. The meditation hall offers meditation programmes and the print studio offers workshops, while a shop-café and a café terrace welcome visitors.

The museum is open from 10:00 to 18:00 (last ticket sales at 17:00) and closed on Mondays. The basic ticket gives access to the outdoor gardens, the paper museum and the art museum, for a visit of about an hour. The Turrell hall, the meditation hall and GROUND are added to this ticket and require a reserved entry time, online or on site; the Turrell hall and the meditation hall cannot be visited on their own.

Distances are long: allow about ten minutes from the Welcome Center to the main building and twenty to the Turrell hall. A one-hour guided tour of the architecture and gardens is offered. From Wonju's bus terminal, the museum can be reached by taxi, tourist bus or shuttle.