Baek Un-cheol rediscovered the beauty and soul of Jeju, where he was born and raised, through stones of all shapes and colors. He is currently pouring all his energy on building an exhibition hall for Seolmundae Halmang, a giant goddess featured in the island’s creation myth, scheduled to be completed in 2020.

That moment of enlightenment led him to give up his beloved garden in order to “a culture park of indigenous stone s that will live on for centuries.” His heart growing warmer still when he looked around the site of the prospective Jeju Stone Park, he decided to “protect this place from its possibly precarious fate” and to “bring Seolmundae Halmang back to life here.”

Seolmundae Halmang (Grandmother Seolmundae) is a giant goddess featured in Jeju Island’s creation myth. According to the myth, she had 500 sons, called “Five Hundred Generals,” and she was making gruel for them in the midst of a severe drought when she fell to her death into the gigantic pot of gruel. In the protagonist of this famous folktale, Baek found the archetype of the Jeju woman and her life of toilsome daily labor, and of great motherhood that could be extended to love for humanity. He chose the folktale as the main theme for the Jeju Stone Park.

Baek donated his entire collection of stone monuments and folklore materials to the local government, which in turn promised to procure a 3.3 km² site for the new park and bear all costs incurred thereafter. In 1999, he signed an agreement with the Jeju autonomous government to work for the park for the following 20 years as head of the planning board, managing exhibitions and presentations. The park, opened in 2006, is still in the making. The underground space, previously a garbage dump, was transformed into a museum, and located above ground are the Gallery of Five Hundred Generals, which also serves as a theater, a village of traditional thatched-roof houses, and a recreational forest. The hall for Seolmundae Halmang, still under construction, is scheduled to be completed in 2020. Baek continues to draw on his imagination and intuition for this ongoing project, living alone in a small shelter on the park premises.

“A spider doesn’t think while spinning its web; the silk just comes out. The same is true for me,” said Baek, who has now reached the final spurt in making his decades-old dream come true. “I hope to showcase history in the hall and present it to posterity. Folklore, mythology and history are essentially the same thing in three separate forms branching from the same origin. On Jeju, rocks are at the basis of them all. We live on rocks and die on rocks. In the end, the stars in the sky are rocks, and the universe itself is a collection of rocks.”

The name of the park contains the words “stone” and “culture” (The literal meaning of its Korean name is “stone culture park.”) because Baek wanted to emphasize that all the components of the park represent “the culture of Jeju islanders that has blossomed on stones.” Fluent in expressing his ideas, he declared, “I wish to spend the rest of my life promoting peace with stones as the medium, associated with meditation and healing. Stones are spiritual beings. Today’s people tend to be swayed by materialistic desires, but it is important to know that there are other realms in the world.”

An eminent architect from Mexico, the late Ricardo Legorreta praised this park by saying, “It must have been a great challenge to fill the museum with all those stones, and the geography of the mid-mountain area has been fully accommodated here to harmony with the surrounding environment. Above all, I find the legend of Seolmundae Halmang very intriguing.”

The French photographer Léonard de Selva gave his impression of the park, saying, “The stones of Jeju have a certain aura. I think this park could itself become a myth on this island of stones, just like Easter Island and its giant statues of unknown origin.”

The red village with 50 traditional thatched-roof houses along Course 3 offers a glimpse of the islanders’ lives in the past. Materials reclaimed from around 200 old houses were used to build the village.

This is one of the oddly-shaped natural stones formed from hardened lava which are exhibited in a gallery of the Jeju Stone Museum on the premises of the Jeju Stone Park.

Baek Un-cheol says he was blessed with a keen eye. He believes he was “born with an eye that finds gems in the midst of garbage and discovers human s in the face of the rocks in a way that most people can’t.”

Just as Jeju Island was d by the goddess Seolmundae, Baek owes what he is today to two women. His mother, a strong-willed woman, built him a 100 m² warehouse in her orchard to help him realize his dream. Others may have been indifferent to a grown man with no particular job, roaming around mountains and fields to collect rocks, but his mother remained his partner and supporter who provided him his first exhibition space. Among her seven children, she was especially fond of this son and would clap her hands in delight whenever he obtained a particularly interesting stone. Needless to say, his wife’s quiet support has also given him confidence in his difficult undertakings.

Stone s related with the everyday lives of the islanders, including millstones and gate posts, are displayed on the outdoor exhibition grounds. Baek Un-cheol collected these articles over several decades.

“Jeju is an island of stones. Gotjawal, the rocky forest on the slope of Mt. Halla, was formed by heaps of rocks, and its residential areas have stone walls which would be longer than the Great Wall of China if connected end to end,” expounded the connoisseur of stone. “The stones have d a spiritual atmosphere in this place, and the 48 dol hareubang, or “stone grandfathers,” scattered all over the island, are our greatest treasures. Such statues made of volcanic basalt are nowhere to be found in the world. The stern goggle-eyed stone men, which were stationed long ago as guardians of the island against Japanese invaders, are truly frightening at night. Each of the statues, which must have been carved by nameless stonemasons, is charged with a soul.”

Furthermore, Baek says he sees “beyond the human world” in a dongjaseok (graveside stone statue in the shape of a child). “Dongjaseok and dol hareubang are the two symbols of Jeju - one spiritual and the other aesthetic. So, whenever I came across a piece that attracted me, I managed to acquire it by any means,” he said.

Baek’s collection, amounting to some 500 truckloads, was moved from his garden of trees and stones to the new stone park over a considerable period of time. Baek also red a mid-mountain village composed of 50 thatched-roof houses built with used materials reclaimed from some 200 old houses. The village was a shooting location for the film “Jiseul” (meaning “Potato” in Jeju dialect), which depicts the 1948 Jeju Uprising, a tragic event in modern Korean history, often distorted by ideological conflict and division.

Explaining the village, Baek said, “I intended to construct not just the replica of an old village but a place for cultural experiences to introduce and hand down our ancestors’ wisdom. I hope to preserve our traditional culture for as long as possible even though it is vanishing elsewhere.”

In his mind’s eye, the ever-present stones appear to be sitting in meditation, with their eyes gently closed. Whether or not you agree, the Jeju Stone Park is the place to go to feel a sense of timelessness. Here, it’s possible to feel that you are one with nature beyond the boundary of time. And, before you know it, you might run into a man walking along a dirt path wearing a worn hat, resembling a white-haired Taoist hermit in a black-and-white landscape.

Stone Houses Another Face of Jeju Island

To an illusion of a volcanic island, ArchiPlan, the architectural firm that designed the Kim Tschang-yeul Art Museum, used exposed concrete cladding finished with black paint, reminiscent of basalt. The image is retained throughout by using basalt rocks for various installations.

Could Jeju Island be seen as an immense volcanic monolith? The barren land, forming the southernmost part of a country that has lived on rice, is incapable of producing rice. No matter where you go on the island, a little digging is sure to turn up some stones. In the past, the islanders would gather the black stones scattered all around them to build their houses and walls. Today, however, a number of factories dig up, process and supply the volcanic stones to builders as demand has shot up amid the recent construction boom.

The vibrant construction market witnessed on the island over the last 10 years or so is attributed to the rising influx of people from the mainland, which started when this popular tourist destination emerged as an alternative home for people tired of city life. The new buildings erected everywhere around Jeju, including public offices, private homes and numerous guesthouses, are all quite individual, but they share a common feature: the use of volcanic stones native to the island.

In spite of its pleasing tone and texture, the popular “Jeju stone” is not suited to support the frame of a building. Hardened while flowing, the lava stones are so porous that they cannot bear structural loads. Therefore, in modern buildings, as in traditional ones, they have mostly been used for the decoration of walls, fences, or yards, as an attractive element mirroring the landscape of the island.

Neuljak is a guesthouse refashioned from a typical Jeju-style house over a hundred years old. Better known by its old name, Stone Home of Ham PD, the guesthouse was opened by a couple who moved to the island in 2011. The original thatched roofs were replaced by slate ones in the 1970s, but the old stone walls remain the same.

Art Museum Embodying the Beauty of Stone

Viewed from the sky, the Kim Tschang-yeul Art Museum looks like a collection of square boulders. Established in 2016, it is located at the Jeoji Artists’ Village in Hangyeong-myon. At first, the sooty exterior of the buildings seems to indicate the use of black stones, but the cladding is actually exposed concrete roughly finished with a coat of black paint. Visitors who recognize this may wonder: Why bother to imitate the native stone when it is so readily available?

Volcanic stones are, as explained earlier, not a suitable material for the frames of large buildings. Nor are they suitable for walls.

Nevertheless, it seems the architect wished to imbue the art museum with the “the feel” of the Jeju stone, which represents the essence of the local architecture.

The presumed wish is evident all over the museum grounds - in the decorative wall along the entranceway, built high like a rampart with unpolished basalt stones; the low gabion fences of black stones running around the buildings; and the rooftops entirely covered in shattered stones. Even the black marble at the center of the pond in the middle courtyard could be mistaken for volcanic rock.

The combination of the imagined presence of the massive rocks buried deep in the ground and the mundane landscape of this island strewn with the ubiquitous black stones has been red with contemporary aesthetics to deliver an image of the “primordial dream of the island.”

Kim Dae-il, director of fig.architects, which designed VT Haga Escape in partnership with Eggplant Factory, said basalt rocks were used all over the villas so that travelers could enjoy the landscape of a local village even when indoors.

Houses Sharing the Warmth of Stone

VT Haga Escape, premium vacation villas built recently in Aewol-eup, features a pleasing array of both interior and exterior walls of volcanic rock all over the premises. The living rooms command a cozy view of stone walls enclosing a small courtyard. Here, guests can enjoy a moment of rest and relaxation looking out at the peaceful view of neat garden walls under the clear blue sky.

If the concrete-framed buildings also had concrete courtyard walls, would visitors want to stay? The architect and the owner must have agreed to a comforting atmosphere with the rough, ancient stones so that guests would feel welcome.

While Haga Escape shows the modern application of Jeju’s traditional stone walls, the Stone Home of Ham PD [recently renamed “Neuljak,” meaning “slow and relaxed,” by the new owner], a guesthouse opened in 2011 in Gujwa-eup, preserves the timelessness of the stones that have been stuck in the walls of the house for over a century.

A comfortable nest for backpackers, the guesthouse has three old buildings with frames, walls and yards kept intact and renovated interiors. Guests happily mingle with each other, often holding a small party at night. In this sense, the modest guesthouse may remind you of your parents’ house during big holidays when the whole family gets together. The original proprietors, who hoped to convey the same feeling to their guests, are a married couple who “immigrated” to the island to settle down in a village that would give them a taste of home, and thus wanted to preserve the original form of the old house.

People who have found a new home on Jeju, whether they have built a new house or renovated an old one, would find it hard to forget the landscape that met their eyes upon landing on the island, with the low walls of dark stones meandering everywhere and the glistening black rocks covering the beaches. The heart-warming beauty of the indigenous stone has been revived in many different forms in the living rooms, bedrooms and yards of their homes.