We recently held a cultural event on May 14th, demonstrating traditional Korean farming practices through a live oxen ploughing performance at our museum’s outdoor terraced fields. This event not only showcased the ‘Gyeori farming culture’ but also featured a hands-on rice planting experience with over 200 students from a nearby elementary school, emphasizing the importance of preserving our agricultural heritage and traditions. The students participated in manual rice planting accompanied by traditional work songs. The varieties of rice planted included indigenous types.

 *Gyeori farming involves a traditional plowing method where a pair of oxen plow fields, a technique primarily used in the mountainous and less fertile terrains of northern Gangwon Province.

The Record of the Land, The Memory of the Earth
– an exhibition at The National Agricultural Museum of Korea

Land is the foundation of agriculture and life, as well as the basis of food production. Earth became land, which farmers cultivated and produced crops from. A handful of earth cultivated by farmers becomes farmland where they sow and harvest.

This exhibition reinterprets the value of land in agriculture and sheds light on its meaning. It intends to draw our attention to the story of the land we have cultivated and kept over millennia by focusing on ‘earth’ and ‘land’, the essential elements of farming. It takes a look at how our thoughts of earth and land change as time goes by from historical, artistic, and ecological perspectives.

We intend to remember the earth that we must safeguard in the future by looking at the records that farmers have left while cultivating our land. We hope this exhibition will serve as an opportunity to think about what ‘earth’ and ‘land’ in agriculture mean to us.

Author: Minjae Lee, International Relations, NAMUK