At Gyeongpo Lake, I Didn't Spend Much Time Looking at the Lake

If someone asked me what the most beautiful thing about Gyeongpo Lake was,

I probably wouldn't say the lake.

The lake itself is beautiful, of course.

I stayed on the top floor of Skybay Hotel. From my room, the East Sea stretched out on one side, Gyeongpo Lake on the other. Open the window and both the sea breeze and the lake breeze drifted in together. In the morning, the water was so still it looked like polished glass. By evening, clouds slowly settled across the sky while lotus leaves swayed gently and an occasional heron skimmed the surface.

It was all beautiful.

But the thing that kept making me stop wasn't the landscape.

It was a series of tiny bronze sculptures scattered around the lake.

Most of them were only thirty or forty centimeters tall.

At first, I took a photo almost absentmindedly.

Then I noticed another sculpture a few meters later.

And another.

And another.

Together, they quietly told hundreds of little stories.

Two young people meeting for the first time. A nervous boy unsure where to put his hands. A young man pretending to be calm while secretly checking whether the girl smiled after receiving his flowers. Lovers falling in love. Lovers saying goodbye. One chasing. One waiting. One quietly crying while the other pretended everything was fine.

Farther along the path stood a young swordsman, a rider on horseback, an old fortune teller counting on his fingers, a child desperately trying to outrun a puppy, naked children laughing together, and a little girl whose tears had been carved permanently onto her face.

None of the sculptures were large.

Yet each one managed to preserve a single moment forever.

What fascinated me most were their expressions.

One laughed so hard it looked as though they might fall over.

Another stared in complete disbelief, mouth frozen open.

One cried with tears etched into bronze.

A little boy held a wooden stick high above his head, as if he were about to swing it at any second.

I stood there much longer than I expected.

Eventually, I caught myself smiling back.

They weren't people from my time.

Some were scholars.

Some were generals.

Some were old.

Others were children.

Centuries separated the clothes they wore from the ones I wear today.

Yet laughter still looked like laughter.

Tears still looked like tears.

And falling in love looked exactly the same.

I cycled slowly around the lake, stopping at one sculpture after another.

Without realizing it, I had quietly traveled through centuries of Korean history.

At one point, while photographing another bronze figure, I noticed a girl who looked Russian stop beside the very same sculpture.

She lifted her phone and spent several minutes taking pictures.

Neither of us said a word.

We simply smiled, nodded to each other, and continued on our separate ways.

Maybe curiosity doesn't need translation.

After completing the entire loop, I went back to my hotel and scrolled through the photos I'd taken.

Only then did I realize something.

The subject I had photographed most wasn't Gyeongpo Lake.

It wasn't the lotus flowers.

It wasn't even the East Sea.

It was the people who never moved.

Later that afternoon, I reached the far side of the lake and found an enormous moon sculpture.

I stood there, very seriously pretending to push it.

Needless to say...

it didn't move.

Long after leaving Gangneung, I still find myself thinking about Gyeongpo Lake.

But strangely,

I don't think about the lake first.

I think about those tiny bronze figures.

In the last photograph I took,

every one of them was still exactly where they'd always been.

There was only one difference.

Now there was one more person beside the lake—

trying to push the moon.