The story behind the name always gets a laugh. About 40 years ago, a local man who'd been in a traffic accident walked with an awkward, waddling gait, and neighbors affectionately nicknamed him "Penguin Uncle" for it. That nickname stuck to the whole neighborhood. The origin of the village itself is even more modest: a resident named Kim Dong-gyun started decorating an empty house with old junk and household items he found piled up nearby, purely as a hobby. Neighbors started contributing their own old belongings, and what could have ended up in a landfill was reborn as junk art, piece by piece. That's why the alley next to the Yangnim Community Center feels like a portal straight into the 1970s and '80s.
There's an unexpectedly international footnote here too. J-Hope of the K-pop group BTS is widely reported to be from Gwangju, and fans in China pooled money to paint a large mural of his face on one of the village's walls to mark his birthday. A retro alley built from decades-old household objects, with a K-pop fandom mural on one wall — the combination shows this isn't a museum frozen in the past, but a living space that keeps getting updated. Young artists have also gathered here on their own initiative to contribute murals, turning what started as one resident's hobby project into something closer to a community-driven public art initiative — a rare case of grassroots neighborhood renewal growing into an actual art movement.