Pung-su: Evolving Cultural Landscapes and Placemaking in Korea

In Korea, for choosing a site and settlement, the Pung-su principles, which interconnect the spirit of the natural landscape and human sensitivity, are the common practice in making, maintaining, and manifesting the cultural landscape as archetypal integrity of habitat. Like any other traditional Korean village, Hahoe has also grown up as a natural consequence of spatio-temporal transformation within the Pung-su principle, which in Asian culture is broadly known as the spontaneity of human habitat. The imbued and manifested meanings of the landscape are conveyed, from one person to another and also from one generation to another, in the frame of Pung-su, which is closely identical to Feng-shui in Chinese landscape, and in both cases, it means “wind and water.” These natural elements are mostly responsible for regulating the cultural notions and traditions in Korean landscapes. With mutual support and interfacing reciprocally, villagers felt themselves “being” here through belonging (existentiality), “becoming” there through adjustment (gracefulness), setting them “behind” there to be backing-base (basement), and also “beholding” them with contemplation to become beholden (contemporaneous: living and being at the same time). Illustrated with a study of village Hahoe (inscribed in UNESCO WHL) through several experiential visits (during 2011–2019) to understand and experience the inherent genius loci and the visuality of cultural landscapes in this village territory, an attempt is made to understand the visuality and the manifested meanings there in that make the whole territory in the cosmogonic frame of sublimity.