A Public Space that Became an Island
The National Theater of Korea is nestled on the Namsan Mountain; the Seoul Arts Center was set up on the Umyeonsan Mountain; and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) was raised in the suburbs of Cheonggyesan Mountain, having been pushed out of the capital following a convoluted sequence of events that made public facilities hard for the public to access. To explain, at the risk of further misunderstanding, the citizen class had lost its chance to recover those spaces and places dominated by the old powers in the transition from a dynasty to a republic in the colonial period and the subsequent military dictatorship. This loss of momentum is still quite influential even now, despite the fact that a significant amount of time has passed since the introduction of a progressive democracy and the recovery of a local autonomous system. It is no simple task to create a new public space in the midst of Seoul, a city driven by
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