Yeondoo Jung’s Wonderland turns children’s drawings into photographs

The person the child drew does not have to touch the ground. Even if the color of the clothes is a little odd or the size of the body and furniture do not match, the picture is complete. But if that scene needs to be made into a photo with real people in it, where should adults start from?

Yeondoo Jung’s “Wonderland” is a series of photographs that translates that question into actual work. Over the course of four months, the artist collected 1,200 drawings by children ages 5 to 7, and selected 17 of them to turn into photographs. The production year listed in the artist’s official records is 2004.

Move reality instead of fixing the picture

The models responsible for the people in the photos are teenagers. He chose teenagers as people physically closer to adults but, he thought, still closer to children in outlook. Instead of correcting the picture to realistic proportions, people who make pictures shift reality towards the picture.

A production interview released in 2026 shows how the people in charge of costumes, props, and makeup discussed how to implement a child's drawing. The task is to find fabric that matches the color of the crayon and to make an object drawn on a flat surface into a three-dimensional shape. A trampoline helped create photographs of people suspended in the air.

In a painting, a single line is enough, but in a photograph, fabric, structure, and a moving body are needed. What the photo shows is not only the child's imagination, but also the reality mobilized to accommodate that imagination.

When looking at two pictures side by side

This task is more fun when you look at drawings and photos together. Even as we look for how similar they are, we discover how different the same scene looks in the two media. A person who seemed natural on paper floats strangely in a photo, and the simple background becomes a place for the person to stand.

Now that images can be created in short sentences, the process of creating a set and having people stand in front of a film camera comes back to mind. There is no need to conclude that the work of that time was a rebuttal to today's technology. However, this photo contains a time when several people entered the world drawn by a child.

The child who drew the picture produced a small piece of paper. Working from that drawing, adults made costumes, found locations and worked out how to make a person appear to float.