The Emergence of Geumgangsan’s Visual Culture and Landscape Painting in the 1910s

Geumgangsan(Mt. Geumgang), long revered as a sacred Buddhist site and a sublime landscape since the mid-Goryeo period, became promoted in the 1910s—under Japanese colonial rule—as both an imperial spectacle and a global tourist destination. In this context, it emerged as a subject of modern visual culture and landscape painting, linked to imperial beautification and colonial development propaganda through popularization and international exposure. Visual representations of Geumgangsan began to appear around 1910–1912, centered on photographic media such as albums and postcards, and expanded through lantern slides, motion pictures, and panoramas. By 1914, Japanese artists, drawn to Geumgangsan as an exotic and picturesque site, contributed to the spread of landscape imagery through mass media sketches and exhibitions like the “Geumgangsan Sketch Exhibitions.” These artists often framed the mountain’s scenic qualities as “Eastern” and akin to Southern School aesthetics. Korean painters engaged with these discourses while continuing the traditional genre of Geumgangsan-do. Around 1918, artists such as An Jung-sik, Jo Seok-jin, Yi Do-yeong, Go Hui-dong, and Kim Gyu-jin began sketching excursions, combining realist approaches with both traditional and Japanese techniques— Kim being particularly proactive in adopting the latter. By the early 1920s, Kim Ye-sik introduced a hyperrealist landscape style influenced by photographic painting, marking a new phase in Geumgangsan imagery. His works, while shaped by modern Japanese aesthetics, also resonate with Korea’s portrait traditions and the lineage of sagyung(lit: capturing the scene)-style real-view landscape painting.