Life
Busan Museum shows more than 80 artifacts on Joseon-era gardens
source: museum.busan.go.kr
Busan Museum is hosting “The Gardens of Joseon: Cultivating the Mind, Appreciating the Landscape,” a special exhibition on Joseon-era garden culture, through Dec. 13. Drawing on a wide range of artworks, the exhibition shows how a love of nature and a refined appreciation of art and leisure shaped the era’s gardens. Admission is free, and a free English-language audio guide is available.
The exhibition explores the landscape philosophy and garden culture of the seonbi, the scholar-literati of the Joseon dynasty. Rather than reshaping nature to suit themselves, they sought to follow its principles and looked to the natural world for guidance in life. More than 80 artifacts show how the seonbi brought nature into their own spaces and recreated surrounding landscapes in their gardens.
Highlights include a blue-and-white porcelain jar designated a National Treasure, along with works designated Treasures, including “Gathering of Scholars at Dokseodang” and King Jeongjo’s paintings of a banana plant and of chrysanthemums. The exhibition also offers a glimpse into the scholars’ inner world, where observing the plants in their courtyards became a way to reflect on the virtues they hoped to cultivate.
The exhibition is divided into three sections, each offering a different view of the philosophy and everyday pleasures of Joseon gardens:
-Part 1: Cultivating the Mind explores the ideal gardens of ancient sages’ stories, along with the imaginary gardens, known as uiwon, that seonbi envisioned when reality fell short of their ideals.
-Part 2: Embracing Nature focuses on borrowed scenery, the traditional practice of incorporating the surrounding landscape into a garden. It also highlights scholars who studied plants such as pine, chrysanthemum and plum blossom as models for self-cultivation.
-Part 3: Appreciating the Landscape looks at the leisure of Joseon literati, who gathered in gardens to exchange poetry, calligraphy and paintings and to play games such as baduk, also known as Go, and tuho, a traditional arrow-tossing game.
The exhibition is open in the museum’s Special Exhibition Hall from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily except Mondays. For more information, visit the Busan Museum website linked below.
※ “Gardens of Joseon: Cultivating the Mind, Appreciating the Landscape”
◎ Dates: Through Dec. 13 (closed Mondays)
◎ Venue: Special Exhibition Hall, Busan Museum
◎ Google Maps: Click
◎ Admission: Free; English audio guide available
◎ Website: Click
<Today's Vocabulary - 오늘의 단어>
appreciation: 감사 reflect: 반영하다 virtue: 미덕 embrace: 받아들이다
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