Landscape Art of the East Sea Rim Region, and the Issue of Topos : Placeness of the “East Sea(Japan Sea)” and “Siberia” in the scenic art
Authors:   Asia-Europe Perspective Association, Kim Seokhee 
Published: June 2018

Examined in this article is the “landscape(scenic) art” of the East Sea Rim region, which covers Korea,China, Japan and even Russia, during the 17th∼19th centuries, as well as the issue of “topos.”Korea, China, Japan and Russia are all positioned extremely close to each other, but show very different types of art in terms of material and methods. But at the same time, there is a certain similarity that is shared by all the arts of these countries, in terms of painting art and the ‘topos’ described in it. From the 17th century through the 19th century, a new landscape began to be portrayed in the East Sea Rim region, and that landscape included the East Sea and Siberia. They are indeed individual places, but tended to come with a new meaning when they were rediscovered by the art.
In most of the attempted definitions of ‘landscape,’ the viewer is on the ‘outside’ of the scene. As a result, landscape art only describes or explains the ‘scene’ itself, and the viewer is not included in the scenic landscape itself in any way. But in an “artistic portrayal of the landscape” is different, as it virtually shows us the scene ‘watched through the eye of the viewer’ at the very moment of the viewing, and therefore lets us know how the scene was perceived by the viewer. In that regard, this specific kind of ‘landscape’ shows us the existential and epistemological nature of the viewed scene. And at the same time, to the viewer, who ‘experienced’ the place him or herself, the landscape or the scene becomes a ‘place’ with a specific meaning, carried by a specific piece of memory.
This kind of ‘place’ is different from any other ordinary place or space, as it harbors a certain meaning to the one who experienced it. And if a certain landscape or scene was portrayed and described over and over again in a specific age or a specific region, we could say that such landscape was the ‘topos’ of that time period, or of that region.
The ‘topos’ in the East Sea Rim region includes many aspects, such as the never ending ‘horizon,’ a perspective viewing from above(a bird's eye view), structures with secular touches of humans, short range scenes of a sandy beach, and the overall grandeur coming from the composition of all these individual images.
The most important element that we can find from the achievements of Jeong Seon, Hasegawa Tohaku and Suricov is the raw beauty and sense of reality, the feeling we can get from an actual ‘place,’ that are most definitely out of the Asian paradise or the city of Napoli.
The East Sea was not a place that was frequently portrayed in the artistic efforts of the artists of Korea, China and Japan. In case of Russia, Siberia did not get the attention it deserved. But these places began to be portrayed with beauty and dignity. Escaping the obvious and old attention that was only paid to the center, the people finally realized that ‘not-here-but-there’ sense of self perception should be replaced by a new ‘right-here-it-is’ kind of notion.