Queen of Tears | The Hyundai Seoul, Yeouido — Queens Department Store

Queens Department Store is the seat of Hong Hae-in's power — the thing she runs, the thing everyone else in her family wants, and the building the camera keeps pulling back from to remind you how much is at stake. It is The Hyundai Seoul, on Yeoui-daero.

The choice was not incidental. When it opened in 2021 it broke the Korean department-store convention of windowless boxes designed to disorient shoppers into staying: a twelve-metre skylight the length of the building, curved white balconies, a fountain on the ground floor and an actual indoor garden on the fifth. Roughly half the floor area was given over to space rather than selling. For a drama about a woman running a retail empire while dying of a brain tumour, a shop built around light and air rather than merchandise is a better set than any studio.

Practically: it is closed Mondays, opens half ten, and the crowds concentrate on B2 where the trend brands are. B1 is the food floor. The fifth-floor greenery and the ground-floor fountain are the two spots people photograph.

Yeouido Station or Yeouinaru puts you within a short walk, and the Han River park is on the other side of the road.

Go up to the fifth floor and look down the atrium through the skylight. Hae-in's problem across sixteen episodes is that she owns something enormous and cannot keep any of it — and this is a building that spends most of its floorplate on emptiness on purpose.

Cover photo: the Yeouido skyline, by S h y numis, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. District view, not the store.