Wonju Picture Book Festival is a citizen-led event that features picture books and helps citizens find a new kind of value of Wonju. The Festival offers a chance to have citizens learn what a citizen-initiated, citizen-led culture is about and put something learned from the festival into practice outside the festival. In 2016, we held the event titled ‘Forming Connection with Picture Books, Citizens, and City’, in 2017, the event titled ‘Wonju Citizens’ Empathy for Picture Books’, and in 2018, ‘Occupation’, the keyword that is equal to the living closely related to everyday life of ordinary citizens, thus offering a chance to look back on where we stand through this festival and picture books.
Wonju becomes a city of picture books every fall.
A Look at Programmes
• Picture Book Exhibition and Experience with Picture Book Artist: This is the main exhibition session of Wonju Picture Books Festival.
• Korean Picture Book Annals Library: This is a facility set up for Wonju Picture Books Festival season only. In the space of the facility, citizens are able to look at all the picture books that have been published in Korea for the last three years.
• Wonju Picture Book Shop: This is a programme designed to display and sell picture books of citizens’ own drawing that tell what they feel and do in their everyday life.
• Wonju Picture Book Gallery: This is a programme that ten to thirteen citizens and/or teams selected from the application process become a display planner and create their own unique space with drawings and pictures in a 6㎡ space with a picture book artist. This is one of programmes in which citizens prefer to participate.
• Wonju Picture Book Forum: This programme offers a chance to listen to presentations, themes, and issues of the festival brought up by invited picture book veterans and guest speakers and have a talk session.
• Share Experience with Picture Book Activists: This programme is designed to bring picture book activists together at the festival, help them share their experience one another, and form a network.