The Erotic Sculpture Garden of Korea: A Virtual Tour
JeJu Love Land is a "whimsical erotic sculpture park" on an island in South Korea. It's been around for years, but we hadn't heard of it until Laughing Squid brought it to our attention.
Not safe for prude workplaces. [Image via Stari4ek]
Jeju is a volcanic island off the southern coast of South Korea. It has 600,000 inhabitants. As the warmest beach vacation spot in South Korea, it is sometimes known as "Honeymoon Isle." [Image via Hoainiemthanh]
In 2006, Der Spiegel called Jeju Love Land a "salacious Disneyland."
"Love Land" is a theme park, about the size of two soccer fields, located in the north of Cheju Island. And it's crammed with soft porn memorabilia—statues, photographs and sculptures that seem like something halfway between a post-modern version of those temple phalluses and a Jeff Koons installation—just more trashy, if that's possible.
Apparently Love Land has been around for a while. In the late '80s Simon Winchester went there and noted that some hotels on the island employed "professional icebreakers." [Butts via LonelyBob, penis via Stari4ek]
You have to be 20 years old to enter Love Land. [Image via Stari4ek]
I keep expecting Tom Cruise to show up in a mask. [Image via SuzyQuzy]
This looks torturous. [Create Sean]
Der Spiegel writer Matthias Streitz concludes,
[N]one of this is proof of an unusually open or relaxed attitude to sex. The opposite is true. A few thoroughly rule-governed exceptions apart, the things that are shown and imagined in Love Land are kept under cover elsewhere in South Korea. In this sense, the theme park is not unlike Asian porn mags or fertility rites: It's a small isle of freedom in an ocean of taboos.
