Shape of Land
January, 2023
Geography held a particular importance in Korean elementary education of my generation. Students were expected to learn not only the provinces, rivers, and major cities of the peninsula, but the intricate system of mountain ranges that runs through it. The degree of attention given to mountains was unusually rigorous, and perhaps reveals something beyond the practical study of geography. The Korean peninsula is overwhelmingly mountainous, and mountains have long occupied a significant position in the cultural imagination of the land. To understand Korea geographically was, in a certain sense, to understand it through its mountains.
Many years later, I began to reconsider this relationship through conversations with my friend Dr. Richard Pegg, a historian of East Asian art and cartography. In his research on East Asian maps, he describes the distinctive role of mountainous terrain in Korean cartographic traditions. Mountains function not simply as geographical features but as organizing structures through which territory is understood. Their presence in maps is consequently both descriptive and interpretive. They locate the land while also giving it a particular character.
Cheonhado (天下圖), anonymous, 1699, Joseon dynasty. Korea University Library, Old Map Collection.
Through this research, I became particularly interested in Cheonhado (천하도, 天下圖), or “Map of All Under Heaven,” a distinctive form of world map that circulated during the Joseon dynasty. These maps present the world as a circular and highly ordered territory, bringing together places that were geographically known with distant lands understood through inherited texts, fragmentary information, and imagination. What interested me was not their geographical inaccuracy, but the apparent completeness of the world they presented.
The boundary between the known and the unknown did not prevent the map from being whole. Where empirical knowledge diminished, other forms of understanding entered. Distant territories were still named and given shape, allowing what could not be directly known to occupy a place within an intelligible world. The map did not leave the unknown empty. It gave the unknown a form.
A map normally carries an assumption of authority. It tells us where something is, where one territory ends and another begins, how a river moves, or where a mountain stands. Yet in Cheonhado, different kinds of knowledge seem to coexist on the same surface. Observation exists alongside inherited knowledge and imagination. What is known and what is believed, remembered, or imagined are not necessarily separated from one another.
Looking at these maps, I began to recognize something familiar in this process. We construct our own understanding of the world in much the same way, with limited information at our disposal. We assemble fragments of what we have witnessed, what we have been told, what we remember, and what we imagine. The missing areas do not necessarily remain empty. We give them form.
Memory operates similarly. My recollection of a place is not a geographical record of it. I may remember the shape of a landscape where I once lived, the route to a friend's house, or the arrangement of my childhood school's playground, but these recollections are spatially incomplete and probably inaccurate. Certain features remain remarkably precise while others disappear altogether. Distance expands or contracts. Separate moments become connected. What remains is not the territory itself but a kind of internal map—geographically unreliable, yet somehow complete.
There is another kind of abstraction involved in the shape of a nation. The outline of the Korean peninsula is immediately recognizable to many Koreans, including those who have never traveled through much of the territory represented by that shape. A national boundary does not correspond to a visible line in the landscape. It is imposed upon mountains, rivers, fields, and coastlines, yet over time this abstract contour acquires an extraordinary familiarity. Geography becomes an image, and the image in turn participates in the construction of collective memory and identity.
I find myself both close to and distant from these images. The land is something experienced physically, remembered imperfectly, and encountered again through representations that have already interpreted it for me. The distinction between an actual place and the image of that place held in memory becomes increasingly difficult to locate.
In Shape of Land, I work within this uncertainty. I draw upon memory, cartographic forms, and territories I have encountered to reconstruct forms of land that do not correspond precisely to any existing geography. The paintings begin with recognizable suggestions of terrain, boundaries, mountains, or mapped territories, but these references gradually become unstable. What might initially appear to be a map may also be read as a landscape, a geological formation, a shadow, or simply an abstract form.
Like the Cheonhado maps that first prompted this investigation, the paintings move between what is known and what is imagined. Their geographical inaccuracies are intentional, but they do not feel incomplete to me. Instead, I am interested in the possibility that an image can remain convincing without being geographically true—that fragments of knowledge, memory, and imagination can together produce a world that feels whole.
They are not maps of a particular place so much as maps of how a place can remain in the mind.