This is a VIRTUAL only event with Dr. Se-Mi Oh.
About the Speaker:
"I am a cultural historian of modern and contemporary Korea who works across the disciplinary boundaries of urban humanities and visual studies. My research is concerned with the question of how history interacts with space. To be specific, I take the city as the subject of my study and also a method of doing history. This leads me to approach visual and textual manifestations of the city not as a reflection of historical reality but as constitutive of it. As I approach the city as the writing of history, I rely on semiotics in decoding space as language and text and employ interdisciplinary approaches of history, visual/media studies, urban humanities, and art and architecture."
Read more about Dr. Se-Mi Oh at the link.
About the Talk:
Nodeul is a man-made island in the Han River that has become a focal point of urban planning debates in recent decades. Once a shifting river sandbank shaped by seasonal flooding, it was transformed into a permanent island in 1917, when the Japanese colonial government raised the bank and reinforced it with stone embankments as part of the Han River footbridge between Yongsan and Noryangjin. Long inconspicuous, Nodeul emerged into public attention in 2005, when Mayor Lee Myung-bak proposed building an opera house on the site. Under Oh Se-hoon, it was rebranded as the “Hangang Arts Island,” a plan abandoned after strong public opposition. Under Park Won-sun, it was reimagined as an urban farm and commons. Today, the Nodeul Dream Island project has brought the site back into the spotlight, with Thomas Heatherwick’s Soundscape winning the most recent international design competition.
This presentation traces the shifting visions of Nodeul across these competing projects and asks what they reveal about the island’s status as an urban exception—a space persistently reimagined, yet never fully settled within Seoul’s urban landscape.
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