Cultivating modernity: public parks, visuality, and knowledge transfer in late nineteenth-century Korea

This paper examines the diffusion of nineteenth-century public parks and their associated ideologies to Korea during the Open Port Period (1876-1910). Among various diffusion paths, it highlights the role of progressive Korean reformists, with particular attention to Yu Gil-jun(1856-1914), a key figure who participated in Korea’s first official delegation to the United States in 1883. His book, Observation on a Journey to the West (1895), showcases Korea’s earliest comprehensive account of the industrialized West. Positioning Yu as both an empirical observer and cultural translator of Western modernity, the paper approaches his text as an intertextual site where the physical landscape of the nineteenth-century public park, its ideological frameworks, and his interpretive perspectives intersect. Through textual analysis, this study reveals three distinct visual epistemologies operating in Yu’s representation of public parks: a reformist gaze oriented toward national modernization, an empirical gaze that reflects key assumptions of the nineteenth-century park discourse through objective observation, and a subjective gaze that departs from that discourse by transforming the park from a retreat from the city into a site from which the city is experienced and aestheticized as urban spectacle, demonstrating the complexity of cross-cultural transfer and local adaptation of nineteenth-century urban design ideals.