Dokkaebi

East Asia is especially rich in myths and legends about monsters and divine beings, and among them, the dokkaebi (goblin in Korean) is the most famous in Korea. One popular belief holds that when an object grows old and is left neglected, a spirit can inhabit it, turning it into a dokkaebi. Because of this, whenever I came across abandoned things, I often imagined that they might come to life as dokkaebi.

One day, I found myself looking at a pair of small rubber shoes—the kind children often wore in the 1990s—and I was reminded of the origins of these creatures. Inspired by the folktales I grew up hearing, I brought my imagined dokkaebi to life through photography.

The first three photographs represent the dokkaebi’s transformation into human form. In the last photograph, the dokkaebi has already taken on a human appearance, but a horn still juts out, betraying its true identity. Clutching its original body—a rubber shoe—tightly in hand, it gazes mischievously at the humans it is about to play tricks on.