Nathan Hawley (bachelor’s, history, Boise) presented his award-winning research poster, “More than a Painting: Korean True-View Landscape Art in Environmental History,” at the 2021 Western Conference of the Association for Asian Studies in October.
Hawley’s research examined the ways True-View Landscape painting, a genre of Korean art developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, represented an emerging sense of Korean nationalism tied directly to the peninsula’s natural landscapes. The paintings served both as depictions of Korea’s unique environment and as maps of and to places significant to the Choseon Dynasty.
“His research is a novel analysis of a pivotal moment in Korea’s national and cultural history and expands our understanding of how art, identity and landscape shape each other within the context of Korea’s dynastic past,” said Lisa M. Brady, history professor at Boise State.
The conference, an affiliate of the Association for Asian Studies, the field’s premier international scholarly organization, selected Hawley’s poster as one of the top three undergraduate presentations for the conference.
Hawley’s poster was developed as part of an assignment for HIST223 Place as Past: Introduction to Environmental History. He continued to develop his research through an independent study with Brady with additional support from world languages instructor Yookyung Lee.