Princess Hwangok Mermaid Statue

A massive bronze mermaid sits on the coastal rocks of Dongbaekseom Island, holding a yellow ball. The figure weighs four tons and stands where its standing predecessor once rose. Only a fragment of the torso from the first sculpture remains at Busan Museum, so the current image on the rocks both continues and changes the old one.

In nineteen seventy-four, the sculptor Kim Jeong-suk received a commission for a mermaid for the coastal rocks of Dongbaekseom Island. She decided that the bronze figure would need its own fairy tale and turned to Shin Ji-sik, a children's writer who taught at a girls' school and made a living from literary work. Kim asked her to invent a story specifically for this sculpture.

That is how Princess Hwangok appeared. Shin invented for her an underwater homeland—the country of Naranda—and a fiancé, King Eunhye of the country of Mugun. After the wedding, the princess settled on Dongbaekseom Island and received human legs, but she missed home. A turtle brought her a yellow jade ball. At the full moon, the stone showed Hwangok her homeland, while she herself turned back into a mermaid and could swim in the sea. The name Hwangok means “yellow jade”; the ball in the hand of the current statue explains both the woman's name and her pose on the rock.

The fairy tale was published as a separate book that same year and immediately affected people for whom a similar story was a family legend. Members of the Gimhae Kim clan revered Heo Hwang-ok as their ancestress—an overseas princess who, according to a medieval legend, sailed to King Suro, the founder of the ancient state of Gaya. In the name Hwangok, the sea voyage, and the wedding to a king, they recognized Heo Hwang-ok. Kim Jeong-suk recalled that after the book was published, the clan association sent indignant protests: in its view, their ancestress had been turned into a mermaid. The heroine invented for the new statue had already collided with the memory of a real clan before people began to call her a character from an old legend.

Kim Jeong-suk cast a standing bronze figure two and a half meters tall and installed it here on the shoreline rocks. In nineteen eighty-seven, Typhoon Thelma smashed the statue and carried it away. People recovered only part of the torso from the water; it was transferred to Busan Museum.

City officials and residents decided to return the mermaid to Dongbaekseom Island. They formed a restoration committee, allocated one hundred million won, and held a competition. The sculptor Im Dong-rak won. In nineteen eighty-nine, his four-ton seated Hwangok appeared on the rock. The upper part of Kim Jeong-suk's mermaid that had stood here remained in museum storage, while the current figure holds the yellow ball from Shin Ji-sik's fairy tale in its palm.