• Journal of the Korean Institute of Traditional Landscape Architecture
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.1-12
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• 2013

Korea's traditional Sokgasans(a artificial rock mountain) are elements of our excellent rock garden culture that have been inherited from Goryeo Era to Chosun Era. This study is to analyze how the culture of Sokgasans in the Goryeo and the Chosun Eras has been has been representated the implications and inherited in terms of historical aspects. Korea's traditional Sokgasans, which were created in the Goryeo Era by imitating the landscape of mountain ranges, created a small artificial mountain made of oddly shaped stones, imitating a real mountain. People in those days would reproduce mountain landscapes through a miniaturization technique, enjoying the pleasure of deep mountains and valleys as they lay on their gardens at home while having an aesthetic experience of the landscape that supported their emotional stability and healing. The inner side of these Sokgasan was intended to represent the world of the Taoist hermit with miraculous powers in terms of utopia, expressing 5 Ak mountains(Song Shan, Taishan, Huashan, Heng Shan and Hyeong Shan) where the mountain of 3 Gods(Youngju, Bongrae and Bangjang) wishing for 'No aging and living long' and idea of the Taoist hermit with miraculous powers are concentrated beyond the beauty of form in the landscape itself. In addition, people could refine their minds by practicing the Confucianist lesson of loving the mountain and water by watching the Sokgasan and imitating 'Famous mountains and lakes" from China and they had been changed and advanced embracing various implications in inner side of Sokgasans. Korea's traditional Sokgasans not only made it possible for people to experience aesthetic landscapes as a practical element of the scenery but also had deep symbolic implications that go beyond their formal beauty and were sublimated as an ideational space of unlimited imagination.