Lee Kang-Ok

10.18399/acta.2014.17.1.003

yadam utopia Landscape visitor communal life spectacle paradoxical fate earthly world

Due to yadam’s characteristic narrative principles that foreground actions and plots, space has played a minimal role. However, particular attention has been paid to the description of space and landscape in the so-called ‘utopia-seeking’ yadam stories. This article analyzes the motives for creating a utopia and its manner of functioning as a landscape in these utopian yadam stories. Utopia creators construct a very exclusive utopia into which they invite visitors to enter. The utopia creators want to show their visitors not just the landscape itself but traces of communal life. The third landscape is either discovered or presumed by these utopia creators, and then introduced to their visitors. This place of absolute spectacle transcends the utopia creators’ lives. Once they become accustomed to the utopia as a place for living in, it loses its freshness and charm as a spectacle itself. Therefore, the utopia creators covertly seek another space that can be appreciated strictly as a spectacle. This experience of the third landscape provides visitors with a decisive chance to cleanse themselves from the dregs of worldly desire and be reborn as new human beings. The more strongly they experience the spectacle, however, the harder it is for them to return to their former lives when they return home. As a result, worldly men try to revisit the utopia; their attempts are unsuccessful, however, because a utopia will not accept anyone who tries to return from the earthly world. The utopian landscape stories of yadam hint at the paradoxical fate of people who simultaneously recall both a utopia and the earthly world.