Where Stone Remembers
A landscape of Jeju myth
On Jeju, the island itself was born of stone. Legend says the giant grandmother Seolmundae Halmang shaped Hallasan from her apron, and her five hundred sons turned to stone in grief. Jeju Stone Park, gathered since 1999 on the site of a former landfill, holds this mythology and the traditions it inspired in one volcanic landscape.
Walls, vessels, figures: all of it volcanic basalt, all of it sharing the same dark skin. That skin is unusually responsive to light. A midday sun draws out warm amber tones; the sunset returns them to deep copper; mist cools them to silver. At the foot of Hallasan, the stone has changed this way for centuries.
Hadam
Walls that breathe.
Low, porous, dry-stacked: walls that broke the gales without trapping them.
Jeju's villages were shaped by wind and basalt. Islanders dry-stacked volcanic stone into batdam: low, porous walls that broke the gales without trapping them. Gaps were left open so people and livestock could pass freely. Thatched roofs, lashed with rope nets against typhoons, kept the houses low and rooted to the earth. At Stone Park, a reconstructed thatched village holds these walls as they once stood.
