In order to investigate the effect of land reclamation on the life of local fishermen, a survey was conducted with the 246 people living in 12 different adjacent villages located in Hwasung District. It was found that income of residents decreased, while the amount of debts increased after reclamation. 65% of the people surveyed answered that their economic situation became worse than before and they blamed the decrease of fishery resources as the main cause. It further led to the loss of the family’s means of livelihood. 40% of the people surveyed claimed that they wanted to leave the fishing village and believed that reclamation divested them of all their hope for the future. Regarding to the effect of reclamation project on the image of Hwasung District, most of the respondents have a negative view on the reclamation project. They have negative views even on the tourism, regional welfare, employment of community residents and local infrastructure. Therefore, it can be concluded that local community residents thought that reclamation project had negatively influenced their overall quality of life.

This is a study on the ecological view of Robert Smithson’s reclamation projects. Smithson was a pioneer of Earth art in the late 1960’s. Robert Smithson believed that he could transform industrial wastelands, such as an abandoned oil rig and a no longer used quarry, into “Earth Art." In the early seventies, he conceived of land reclamation as a new art form and called this art “Reclamation Projects.” His attention regarding industrial ruin started from the American political and social situations in the 1960’s. In the late 1960’s, American society was in chaos from the right of movement of African Americans, the women’s rights movement and from the strike for renunciation of the Vietnam War. The intellectual class seemed to believe that it was the destiny of a closed system’s society to run in the direction of entropy. Smithson, who was skeptical about the system of American society, also thought that entropy was the proper diagnosis to describe America’s situation in the 1960’s. The 1960’s civic movements like the civil rights movement and antiwar movements expanded into the environmental movements based on ecological views of the 1970’s. The government had also started to worry about environmental pollution. Thus, the reclamation act was also established in 1972. Smithson believed that the relation between art and social background are closely related and affect each other. He was concerned with how art can join society, and the result was reclamation projects. Such reclamation projects lie on man-made wastelands, like abandoned oil rigs and no longer used quarries, which was an allegory of entropy. He also thought that Frederick Law Olmsted was a pioneer of earth art. The aesthetic category of Olmsted’s view of landscape is to be based on the picturesque of Uvedale Price and William Gilpin. So Smithson, who considered Olmsted as his touchstone, also accepted the picturesque. Such reclamation projects aim to change with nature by adapting the creative power of artists to the ruin which has the highest level of entropy in industrial society. Smithson wanted this to become the bridge between man and nature. His reclamation project’s aim, which shows the system interacting between man and nature as a network, is not different from the ecological view of the 1970’s environmental movement.