‘Jangdokdae’

Deoksugung in Seoul is known for its past as the Joseon dynasty’s imperial palace as well as for the Stonewall Walkway outside its walls. It’s a picturesque promenade popular among tourists and locals alike, often making an appearance in K-dramas, despite the urban legend of its curse: couples who walk here are fated to split.

The walkway is also home to a strange, semi-surreal set of sculptures, seemingly shrinking and warping the space around them. It depicts a family consisting of three children, their parents, and grandparents, all of distorted proportions. They look straight out of a bizarro Photoshop, a sort of tangible trompe l’oeil popular in Seoul.

The sculpture was created by Yi Hwan-kwon in 2009, inspired by the jangdokdae, a traditional open-air storage space for jars to ferment food in, such as kimchi and doenjang. The artwork is also titled Jangdokdae and each of the family members seems to be shaped after the jangdok jar, rather squat and Tweedledum and Tweedledee-esque. It’s a pleasant peculiarity to stumble upon while walking along the stone walls of Deoksugung, even if many people simply walk past with a question in their heads: “What the heck were those things?”