![Sample our Built Environment journals, sign in here to start your access, Latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5926/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Built-Environment.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Iconographical landscape warfare is one example of conflict that refers to a broad spectrum of encounters between opposing social groups who share a common reading of cultural landscapes. This 'warfare' ranges from expressions of violent force to seemingly banal everyday practices. Iconographical landscape warfare works through a dual process of denaturalising/renaturalising landscapes, where the interpretations of certain features are either erased or reinforced. I offer an overview of three examples: firstly, the case of a palimpsest in Seoul, where the dispute over a particular cultural land scape icon revealed tensions between two social groups; secondly, the deployment of symbolically antagonistic landscape objects in Hong Kong within a single social group with a unified reading of the cultural landscape; finally, a conflict surrounding an iconic landmark in Auckland. Taken together, these examples reveal the way objects can be deployed in a landscape to affect change, and how these actions are often resisted and subverted.
Acknowledgments
This paper developed from my cultural geography lectures given at the University of Auckland. I am grateful to Jonathan Rankin, Yvonne Brill, Frances Moon and Caroline Yoon for their valuable comments and editorial help.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Fengshui which literally means ‘wind and water’ is an age old Chinese system of divining and selecting auspicious sites for building harmonious structures such as graves, houses, temples or settlements including villages and cities. In English it is also known as geomancy. This ancient art seems to have originated from the Loess Plateau, China and has been a major controlling factor of human behaviour in China as related to various aspects of residential conditions. For more discussion on the nature of fengshui and its impact on East Asian culture, see Hong-key Yoon (Citation2006); Madeddu and Zhang (Citation2017).
2. Despite such sentiment the building was used as the Korean government building for a while before it became the national museum housing valuable artefacts of Korean national heritage. The use of the Japanese colonial government building as a national museum could symbolically suggest that the Japanese colonial rule was over, for a museum is to house and display the past, not the present. However, without removing the building from the palace grounds the Korean government could not restore the Korean palace to pre-Japanese occupation condition.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Hong-key Yoon
Dr Hong-key Yoon is currently an associate professor (geography) in the School of Environment at The University of Auckland, New Zealand. He was born and raised in a small Korean village, Haep’yŏng of Sŏnsan County, North Kyŏngsang Province, and completed a Ph.D. degree at University of California, Berkeley where he studied cultural geography and ideas relating to culture-nature relationships. He has published a number of articles in the fields of geomancy in Korea and China, Maori culture in New Zealand, and environmental ideas in folklore. His publications include three books written in English and one in Korean: Geomantic Relationships between Culture and Nature in Korea (1976), Maori Mind, Maori Land (1986), The Culture of Fengshui in Korea (2006) and Ttang-ui Maum (The Mind of Land; in Korean, 2011) and an edited volume, P’ungsu, A study of Geomancy in Korea (2017).