Lee Jung-seop Street

Four people lived in 4.6 square metres

In January 1951, Lee Jung-seop reached Seogwipo with his wife and two young sons as Korean War refugees. Local couple Song Tae-ju and Kim Soon-bok gave the family a single room measuring about 4.6 square metres — 1.4 pyeong. All four lived there for roughly eleven months

The room is still the most important object on the street. It sits inside a low Jeju thatched house, small enough that an adult can barely stretch out. Lee fed his family partly by gathering seaweed and catching crabs and fish along the coast below; children, crabs, Seopseom and the Seogwipo shoreline entered the work he made during this period

Seogwipo built a cultural street around that room

The city began creating Lee Jung-seop Street in 1996 and completed restoration work around the residence in 1997. Today the wider Artists’ Path links Lee’s street with Soam Hyeon Jung-hwa, the calligrapher memorialized at Soam Memorial Hall, and painter Byun Shi-ji, whose work is shown at Kidang Art Museum. Along Lee Jung-seop Street itself, small shops sell illustrated souvenirs and handmade crafts based on his work

The street’s scale stays modest. Lee’s preserved residence is at 29 Ijungseop-ro; the museum complex sits immediately above it, and the commercial street runs downhill toward the old downtown and coast. His drawings now appear on souvenirs and street details, but the 4.6-square-metre room keeps the memorial project attached to an actual episode of displacement and family life

The street is still deciding what counts as memory

A second building on the street tells a less settled preservation story. Seogwipo Tourist Theater opened in 1963 as the town’s first cinema, closed in 1999, and later returned as a cultural venue. Seogwipo City bought it in 2023

In 2025, a structural inspection gave the building the lowest safety grade and demolition began. Part of the outdoor structure was already removed when opposition from residents, architects and cultural groups halted the work. In July 2026, Jeju’s provincial audit committee concluded that the city had mishandled parts of the demolition procedure

The contrast is unusually direct: one tiny refugee room has been carefully preserved and turned into the center of a cultural district, while a later layer of Seogwipo’s cultural life became the subject of a public fight over demolition

Before you go

Start with Lee Jung-seop’s residence before the shops and museum material; its physical size changes how the rest of the street reads. From there, the road naturally descends toward Seogwipo’s old center and Jaguri coast, where Lee’s family caught crabs and where Seopseom appears across the water