Seoul Colloquium in Korean Studies
(Organized by the Seoul Center of the ÉFEO and RAS Korea)

We would like to inform you of the March 2021 Colloquium.

** Because of the current situation this will not, after all, be a physical lecture, but will be available by Zoom. All who wish to participate in this Zoom lecture MUST register in advance by sending an email to efeoseoul@hotmail.com They will then be sent the Zoom link. The date and other details have not changed.

Date: Thursday, March 25, 2021 starting at 6 pm.
Speaker: Jérémie Eyssette (Assistant Professor at Chosun University)
Venue: Online Zoom platform

Instrumentalizing Cartographic Voids and Visions in Neo-Confucian Chosŏn and Renaissance France (15th-16th centuries)

The aim of this presentation is to examine Chosŏn and Renaissance maps through the prisms of landscape painting and perspective. To establish the validity of a cartographic comparison between Neo-Confucian Chosŏn and Renaissance France, this presentation will first explore the epistemological and technical substrates that differentiate but also interconnect the 1485 Ryūkoku Kangnido (混一疆理歷代國都之圖) –in which the lost 1400 P’altodo (八道圖) is admittedly subsumed– and Oronce Fine’s Recens et integra orbis descriptio (1536) and Nova totius Galliae descriptio (1538). In the light of sensitive political contexts, it will then be argued that cartographers were compelled to divulge, dissimulate, distort or simply omit different sets of data. Ultimately, this contribution contends that the Kangnido cartographer and Oronce Fine resorted to their respective painting techniques and concepts to structure their work in binary categories of disclosed and concealed elements –science and ignorance, spiritual and administrative imperatives, past and present policies, status quo and revisionist concepts. In doing so, they turned landscape painting and perspective into a new art –the instrumentalization of cartography in the name of Neo-Confucian Chosŏn and Renaissance France.

Jérémie Eyssette is an Assistant Professor at Chosun University. His research focuses on the instrumentalization of culture through maps, languages, technologies and Official Development Assistance (ODA).

We hope that as many as possible of you can come to this event.

Elisabeth Chabanol
Brother Anthony