Tim Burton is in Seoul on his first visit to the country, but he’s not here to promote a film. Instead, the American director is promoting a touring exhibition of his artworks.

The American director is widely known for his unique filmmaking style, but he is less known as an artist who began drawing at an early age and attended the California Institute of the Arts.

He studied animation after being awarded a fellowship from Disney for whom he went on to work for four years. He later left Disney to work on his own film projects.

Originally organized by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the center of the modern art world, the unique exhibition set to open at the Seoul Museum of Art Wednesday explores the full range of his creative work, tracing the current of his visual imagination from early childhood drawings through his mature work in film.

Burton expressed special thanks to two of the MoMA curators, Ron Magliozzi and Jenny He, who co-organized the exhibition, saying holding an exhibition of his artworks in MoMA was one of the most unbelievable events in his life.

“They spent years looking through my closets, boxes and found things that I never knew existed…They really sort of acted like archaeologists,” he said in a press conference in Seoul on Tuesday.

The filmmaker says a lot of his inspiration came from his efforts to maintain a childlike perspective.

“You know, early in your life, when you’re new to life and when you’re young, you see things in a new way. And as you get older, it’s always important to try to see things from that perspective.

Especially in the modern age where there is a lot of responsibility and phones always ringing, a lot of technology, it’s important sometimes just to take moments to have that personal feelings. And again try to see things from a different angle and from a different perspective,” he said.

In the news conference, Magliozzi, one of the MoMA curators, said the exhibition was aimed at exploring all of the filmmaker’s creative motives and making him communicate with audiences beyond the big screen.

“Our goal was to do an exhibition that deals with Tim’s creative imagination and that’s an imagination that expresses itself not only on the screen as a filmmaker but on paper in concept of art and actually in the form of objects,” he said.

“So this remarkable access to Tim’s archive and to be the first institution to present these materials was a great honor for us and a challenge.”

The exhibition brings together more than 700 examples of rarely or never before seen drawings, paintings, photographs, moving image works, concept art, storyboards, puppets, maquettes, costumes, and cinematic ephemera from such films as “Edward Scissorhands” (1990), “The Nightmare Before Christmas” (1993), “Batman” (1989), “Mars Attacks!” (1996), “Ed Wood” (1994), and “Beetlejuice” (1988), and from unrealized and little-known personal projects that reveal his talent as an artist, illustrator, photographer, and writer working in the spirit of Pop Surrealism. 

(Yonhap News)