• Date: November 28th, Friday, 2025, 13:00 – 18:00
• Location: Samick Hall (Room 220), SNUAC (Bldg. 101)

On Friday, November 28, 2025, from 13:00 to 18:00, the symposium “Artist Lee Ungno and Mount Kumgang” will be held at Samick Hall, Seoul National University Asia Center, co-hosted by the Lee Ungno Museum and SNUAC Northeast Asia Center.

In the first half of the twentieth century, Mount Kumgang served as a major source of inspiration and an important artistic motif for Korean artists, including Goam Lee Ungno. Due to the Japanese government’s promotion of domestic tourism beginning in the 1920s, Mount Kumgang became a prominent subject not only for Korean artists but also for artists from Japan and China. After the division of the Korean Peninsula, however, Mount Kumgang came to be interpreted differently in the North and South, and in the summer of 2025 it was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List by North Korea.

Before Korea’s liberation, Lee Ungno traveled to Mount Kumgang several times, observing its scenic sites firsthand and recreating them in the traditional landscape painting style. Yet after the Korean War—and especially after he moved to France in 1958—Mount Kumgang became a place he could no longer reach, accessible only through memory. In his years abroad, Lee expressed the Mount Kumgang of his mind through abstraction.

This symposium focuses on the shifting spatiality and artistic significance of Mount Kumgang within Lee Ungno’s creative practice, examining how its meanings have transformed across different subjects and contexts from the twentieth century to the present. By tracing the multiple interpretations of Mount Kumgang across time and space, the symposium seeks to reassess its cultural-historical value. It also aims to bring together recent research from the humanities and social sciences and to explore new methodological approaches for the study of visual art.