The Diamond Mountains, Korea, A Fantasy

The Scottish artist Elizabeth Keith was among only a handful of foreign visitors to Korea in the early twentieth century. She journeyed to the Diamond Mountains during her stay in the 1920s and wrote of her experience: “I would not have missed the grandeur for all the danger. Sometimes a mountain-top would appear like the dome of a great cathedral. Then the tops would look like jagged spires. . . . The beauty of the climb was a revelation to me.”

Her playful interpretation of Nine-Dragon Falls and the pool below—incorporating the eponymous mythical beasts—is startling in its iconographic departure from the established Korean conventions. The adjacent print is as fantastical as the title suggests: Buddhist deities float above the rocks instead of being carved into them, and tigers crouch in the midst of the landscape. The individual motifs in these prints are familiar in historical Korean paintings, yet the overall iconography is unorthodox within traditional representations of the Diamond Mountains.