The Orient Seen Through Imperialist Eyes: British Landscape Imagery of Korea in the 1880s to 1910s

This paper examines the construction of representative landscape images of Korea by British travellers from the 1880s to the 1910s. Repeated depictions of popular Korean sites, including palaces and gates of Seoul, rocky terrains and temples of Geumgangsan Mountain, and the lake summit of Baekdusan Mountain, provided tangible references to the territory and placeness of the Korean nation-state for Western readers newly introduced to the Eastern ‘hermit nation’. Images created by Western visitors to Korea using photography and disseminated via mass print were instrumental to standardizing and popularizing select scenic sites both within and outside of Korea. They also indirectly shaped Korean aesthetics of national landscape as many Korean and Japanese depictions of key geographical sites came to emulate Western photographic and painterly compositions from the early twentieth century. This paper investigates how landscape imageries resulting from Britons’ travels have interpreted Korean landscape through a lens shaped by colonial attitudes, often presenting them as exotic, inferior, or primitive, which prolonged and added weight to the subsequent formulation of Japanese imperialist associations of Korea with backwardness, idleness, and untamedness.