• “ABSTRACT” from
  “the Journal of Korean Institute of landscape architecture”

The BYEONG-SAN-Confucian Academy, a 17th-century World Heritage Site in Korea, is being praised as a manifestation of naturalness or non-artificiality
of the traditional Korean borrowed scenery technique, chagyeong).
Cha-gyeong = borrow scenery from and/or place the beautiful background of the scenery)

This study, however,
aims to reinterpret the chagyeong of the BYEONG-SAN Academy (hereafter the Academy) as a device of illusion evoking an idealized vision of nature. In the
process of interpretation, ‘picture and frame’—a widely accepted expression that represents the chagyeong of the Academy—will be foregrounded as the pivotal
concept mediating the change of perspectives from naturalistic to ideological.
This study consists of the following three parts.

First, it shows that ‘picture and frame’ represent a modern way of seeing the Academy as an architectural heritage 
in harmony with nature; it denotes pristine nature and the empty architectural frame that safely circumscribes the innate beauty of the natural landscape.

Second, departing from the naturalistic perspective,
this study argues that the architectural framework of the Academy composes scenography enticing the viewer to imagine the idealized, Confucian image of nature that
compares to the landscape imagery found in the landscape poetry and paintings that were produced and appreciated by the 17th-century Confucian literati.

Lastly, based on the above interpretation, this study stresses that the
‘picture’ one encountered at the Academy in the 17th century was not the framed
scene of a natural landscape but the illusion it caused; the architectural ‘frame’ worked not as a symbol of naturalness but as an institutional apparatus of vision manipulating the way one sees—and therefore imagines—the landscape.