The Spellbinding Allure of Seoul's Fake Urban Mountains
WiredMountains have always been central to Korean identity. Around a decade ago, South Korean photographer Seunggu Kim began noticing a new trend of luxury apartment complexes in Seoul being built around elaborate re-creations of famous Korean mountains. One of the South Korean landscaping companies that builds such mountains—which are generally made out of polystyrene cores topped with real rocks and vegetation—even copyrighted the term "Jingyeong Sansu", after a 17th-century Korean art movement that emphasized depictions of actual mountains rather than imaginary ones. "I would see people walking quietly around these mountains, like they were under a spell," Kim says. To Kim, the fake mountains represent an attempt by wealthy South Koreans to mediate the relationship between the country's highly urbanized present and a rural, quasi-mythical past.
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Photographer captures Seoul’s artificial ‘mountains’
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