Engaging with the Rural Landscape

Unlike metropolitan districts, which are mostly shaped by the market, rural areas are modified primarily by the government—this is the case commonly found in Korea. The Saemaeul Movement – a political initiative to modernise rural villages in the 1970s – supported the construction of zinc roofs and newly-laid roads. In the mid-1990s, when the rice market opened, thousands of crop collection centres were built all around the provinces, within only two years, in the name of reinforcing competitiveness. In the 2000s, murals were drawn all over countryside villages to strengthen communities, under the community aesthetics policy. On the walls of rural facilities, the respective names of government projects were engraved like signatures. Miscellaneous products, manufactured by both the central and local government, have piled up in the country landscape.

Rural areas are often disrespected by property developers—what they tend to create are holiday lodges. In the mid-1990s, when semi-agricultural zones were introduced, many urban dwellers escaped their cities with a dream of a rustic life. It seems that by ‘rural’, they refer to a pristine space of nature devoid of people. Facing this assumption of rural residency, the three projects of Lee Eunkyung are like a tonic—she expands upon the ‘value of sharing’, innate within a collective residence, to go beyond