• Journal of the Korean Institute of Landscape Architecture
• /
• v.37 no.1
• /
• pp.110-119
• /
• 2009

Sosang Pal-Kyung(瀟湘八景), which originated in China and means eight scenes of So River and Sang River, greatly influenced the poems and the pictures in East Asia for a long time and became a cultural phenomenon leading the stereotype of the traditional landscapes in Korea and Japan. Studies on 'Kyung(a scene)' such as 'Pal-Kyung(八景)', have been made continuously until now, but there are no results of a study intensively focusing on the meaning and the form of Sosang Pal-Kyung, which is the origin of the domestic Pal-Kyung culture. The goal of this study is to investigate the typical form observed in Sosang Pal-Kyung-Ga(瀟湘八景歌) and Sosang Pal-Kyung-Do(瀟湘八景圖), as a text of a cultural landscape, and to clear up the coherence structure between a recognition system and a way of thinking that existed in the cultural phenomenon of Sosang Pal-Kyung. In this study, the symbolism of Pal(八) was summarized and the surface structure and the correlation of each Kyung of Sosang Pal-Kyung was explained in light of semiotics through segmenting and disjointing the lexeme of a landscape while the coherence structure and the meaning of Sosang Pal-Kyung-Ga and Sosang Pal-Kyung-Do as a text were investigated. Sosang Pal-Kyung is based on the view of the Sun and the Moon(or Positive and Negative) and the Eight Trigrams(八卦) for divination and is a linguistic symbol in which human life and the principle of circulation and conversion of nature are expressed as characters and picture texts. Its structure has strong coherence and cohesion, which attempt to move the abstruse truth of nature into human consciousness by developing and corresponding the grammatical structure and form of the sentences and the implicative languages emphasizing the symbolism of the words to the characteristics of similarities and contrast. In addition, Sosang Pal-Kyung expresses human life, the processes of birth and death of nature and the mutual response dialectically by putting various factors of the landscape in the frame of regular formality and structure. It is considered that the image signs in Sosang Pal-Kyung emphasize the theory of circulation of human life and nature are narrative scenery, which one looks at with a contemplative view in the circulation system of the time and the season. The cultural phenomena of Sosang Pal-Kyung in the Joseon Dynasty, which had been handed down from the Goryeo Dynasty, had become the driving force of leading aesthetics of Joseon's art and literature by adding the scenery of the point of view of Sung Confucianism. Its coherence structure was changed, but its cohesion was handed down continuously so that it became not only the basic text of the traditional and cultural landscape but also, the typical Korean-style stereotype of a landscape.