What Do Mother Teresa and Oprah Have in Common? Big Heads in Korea - WSJ.com

By EVAN RAMSTAD

EUMSEONG, South Korea—Round a bend on a two-lane country road in central South Korea and Chung Geun-hee's life work comes into view: dozens of giant granite heads.

Like a Stonehenge gone wild, they stretch down a ridge line, up another and around a hill. Turn in to a parking lot and hundreds more come into view.

For 20 years, Mr. Chung has ordered 12-foot-high busts of famous people from a sculpting school he owns in China, then has shipped them to the grounds of a psychiatric hospital and elderly care facility that he owns in the mountains of central South Korea.

Giant Stone Faces


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The result is one of South Korea's most unusual tourist sites, the Great Stone Face Sculpture Park.

"No matter where you go in the world, you can't see this many great figures in one place," says Mr. Chung.

The unusual collection, says Mr. Chung, began as an effort to create a diversion for the patients and their families. Over time, he says, it evolved into something more—drawing everyone from schoolchildren to tourists.

The effort isn't cheap. Mr. Chung says a single sculpture costs at least $10,000 to be produced and shipped.

Parks of huge sculptures aren't uncommon—though most are created by museums or governments rather than individuals like Mr. Chung. In Taipei, approximately 1,000 large sculptures dot the 25 acres of the Juming Museum. The 212 sculptures of Norwegian artist Gustav Vigeland have been a landmark in Oslo's Frogner Park for nearly a century.

Texas sculptor David Adickes created 20-foot-tall busts of all the U.S. presidents for parks in a handful of states. The World Sculpture Park in Changchung, China, is one of the largest, with 450 modern art sculptures on 227 acres.

By contrast, Mr. Chung's park is small, around 20 acres, but it stands out for the sheer variety of people that he has commemorated in stone. "Politics, economics, culture, religion, sports, revolutionaries, inventors, scientists, thinkers, writers, explorers, historians, entertainers, athletes and Nobel Prize winners," he says, a phrase he repeats like a mantra.

He has every South Korean president and most U.S. presidents. Not to mention Oprah Winfrey, John Lennon and Arnold Schwarzenegger. He has the recent leaders of neighbors China and Japan as well as many of the crowned heads of Europe.

The park has some interesting juxtapositions. A giant bust of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart hangs out next to one of Valentina Tereshkova, the Russian who was the first woman to fly in space. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis is near David Beckham. Hillary Clinton keeps company with Madeleine Albright and Margaret Thatcher. Tiger Woods is next to Korean golf great Se Ri Pak. Elvis is beside Michael Jordan.


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BUST OF OPRAH WINFREY

There is a row of big heads of world leaders from about a decade ago, including George W. Bush, Tony Blair and Kofi Annan. And there is even a row of global rogues that includes Idi Amin, Kim Il Sung, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden and Adolf Hitler. Mother Teresa anchors a line of women winners of the Nobel Prize.

Most of Korea's famous historical figures, including King Sejong, who invented the national alphabet, are there. The founders of South Korea's biggest universities look onto another row that includes Harry Potter. Ban Ki-moon, the U.N. secretary-general who was born just a few miles away, is honored with two sculptures.

Even after he ran out of places to put the statues, Mr. Chung kept ordering more. He now estimates he has 6,000, most in a storage area a few miles from the hospital and park.

There are a few new granite figures in the bunch. They include Park Geun-hye, South Korea's new president; Psy, the horse-dancing Korean rapper. Both the U.S. president and first lady, Barack and Michelle Obama are set to debut as well.

But Mr. Chung draws a line at most contemporary business leaders, however. "We're often asked by businesses to honor their chairmen, but we don't do that," he said.

In the early 1970s, when a relative was diagnosed with a mental illness, Mr. Chung quit his job at a paper factory and, at age 27, started a mental hospital. His interest in stone sculpture began after he visited Mount Rushmore in the U.S. in 1990. He decided the patients at his hospital and South Korean schoolchildren would be inspired by something akin to it.

"Great cultural assets are all made of stone," he said.

Mr. Chung left his management position at the hospital three years ago and has since concentrated on the park. Now, at age 67, he is confronted with a dilemma: what should he do with his masterwork?

Although he estimates the statues are worth tens of millions of dollars, and he says he pulls in some revenue from lending them to museums and other parks, the collection "has become an economic burden," says Mr. Chung.

He hopes someone in government will take it over—and is prone to exaggeration. "The government is planning a park that is larger than Disney DIS +1.90% !" he says he frequently tells visitors.

South Korea has taken some quirky projects under its wing before. The local government in Suwon, a suburb of Seoul, took control of a toilet-shaped home of a former mayor after his death and turned it into a museum of bathrooms.

And the coastal city of Gangneung helped pay for a phonograph-shaped building to hold a local businessman's collection of Thomas Edison memorabilia, including hundreds of gramophones and light bulbs.

But Mr. Chung is having difficulty getting a government agency interested in his busts. A spokesman for the Ministry of Culture and Sports, which oversees national parks, said the committee that deals with such requests hasn't taken up the sculpture park. In recent weeks, Mr. Chung has been meeting with local officials but so far nothing has been lined up.

Despite its variety, the Great Stone Face Sculpture Park isn't well known to South Koreans. It isn't mentioned in any of the country's national tourist guides, though it is featured in maps and brochures for the province, Chungcheongbuk-do. Entry costs around $5.50.

Bak Jae-bong, who writes a popular Korean travel blog, visited the park last year on a tour arranged by the local government and wrote a series of recommendations—topped by getting more space.

"There were too many sculptures and they weren't spaced out well," he said. "At first I looked at each sculpture with interest but, towards the end, they just looked same."—Min Sun Lee contributed to this article.

Write to Evan Ramstad at evan.ramstad@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared March 7, 2013, on page A1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: What Do Mother Teresa and Oprah Have in Common? Big Heads in Korea.