Territory and landscape are vitally important to both nations currently on the Korean peninsula. Historically both Koreas have contested and imagined the others territory as their own. However, both Koreas have both been forced to consider what the landscape of the other might look like at the moment of or following unification. Occasionally both Koreas have joined together to enact and imagine such moments of unification. This paper in particular considers arboreal elements of geography and topography reproduced at moments of intersection between the two Koreas, and how they are historically framed, imagined and grounded and embodied in real materiality, so they are not just imagined places in the future, but places of imagination in the present. Specifically, this paper focuses on a ceremonial tree planting ceremony on the April 27, 2018 between Kim Jong Un and Moon Jae-in at the April 2019 Inter-Korean Summit held at Panmunjom in the Joint Security Area. Using the work of Denis Cosgrove, Nak-chung Paik, Gilles Deleuze, Heonik Kwon and Byung-ho Chung, the paper places the ceremony and other symbolic elements that day within a wider historical-geographical and transnational frame of the place of trees and topographic features at moments in which both practices of political authority and unification are performed and enacted in Korean history.

Mountain worship and sanshin (mountain gods) legends are intrinsic to Korean culture. Central for narratives of anti-colonial struggle and contemporary policy of North Korea, Mt. Paektu also became a symbol of Korean national identity in South Korean popular culture. This paper engages two legends sited there, suggesting that their main protagonists represent contemporary sanshin. Firstly we consider the image of Kim Chŏng-suk of North Korea, and those narratives addressing her husband, Kim Il-sŏng’s guerrilla resistance in terrains surrounding Paektu. As a bodyguard of Kim Il-sŏng and a champion of revolutionary struggle, Kim Chŏng-suk transcends her human nature, and embodies female presence on Mt. Paektu. Secondly the paper investigates narrative from contemporary South Korean practice GiCheon (氣天 Kich’ŏn), intended for physical and moral cultivation of a person, reinvented in modernity on the basis of ancient East-Asian traditions. It recounts a mythic meeting of Bodhidharma with the Immortal Woman of Heaven (天仙女 Ch’ŏnsŏnyŏ) dwelling at Mt. Paektu. The Woman of Heaven overpowers Bodhidharma in battle, challenging patriarchal gender conceptions and contesting Chinese cultural superiority. Examined together, these two narratives demonstrate common cultural background. Ancient tradition, passed down from past to present, continuously accumulates and transforms, acquiring new forms in South and North Korean contexts.