Ten Versions of Seeing the Nightscape in Seoul

Abstract

The cultural landscape has served as a means of exploring the repertoires of cultural areas and cultural diffusion. Recent discussion features the thicket of analogies identified with new cultural geography as well as the rhetoric of performativity decreed by the affective turn. However there remains a critical caveat in that landscape interpretation has been pursued on the sole backdrop of daytime. Nighttime scenery has been muted with few attempt to interpret the real and symbolic meanings and consistently marginalized in landscape studies. It is the advent of 24-hour life style in tandem with the post-industrial consumer society that allows cityscape to see the light of night. In this article I try to test the plausibility of D. Meinig’s ten versions of an ordinary landscape by loitering along the streets of Seoul in an attempt to look into a diversity of everynight urban landscapes amid floods of incandescent electric lights. The journey conforms that Seoul’s nightscapes have multiple meanings of nature, habitat, artifact, system, problem, wealth, ideology, history, place and aesthetic in line with Meinig’s conceptualization. It is time to further the discourse by relying on such highly insightful metaphors as text, theatre, carnival, spectacle, ways of seeing, symbol, sign and icon.