Why the Pumkins and Cabbages Matter More Than the Monument

Curating Decay: Why the Pumkins and Cabbages Matter More Than the Monument

Field Notes from Korea's Disappearing Edge

The Seowon and Mr. Kim, the excellent 'interpreter' who very generously answered to all of my curcious questions while visiting the Hahoe village and the Confucian Academy.

There is a particular kind of silence in the rural Korean countryside that I havent imagined while I have been evolved in research work while at UNESCO in Sejong. During our trip to Andong last week (that’d be late October 2025), this silence somewhat became my fixation. No wonder my colleagues were wonderful company, funny, insightful, and during the while they sketched and photographed the hertiage from creative angles, I kept wandering off to peer into windows of houses that looked lived-in until you noticed the calendars stopped at 2019! And then, there was this loudest silence I felt! This is the ‘sound’ of a landscape where heritage has outlived its people! And it forces a difficult question: what, exactly, are we preserving, and for whom?

The silence grew much louder in two abandoned churches I we went during our second day visit. They were not on any UNESCO-endorsed heritage map that mattered. They were just there, and their particular decay felt more urgent than anything we'd officially come to see.

What I learnt post-trip is nearly half of South Korea's regions are now designated as 'extinction risk' zones! That's not hyperbole, it's a demographic reality. But statistics don't prepare you for how absence actually sounds. The abandoned buildings are not mere ruins; they are architectural archives of this slow-motion collapse, telling a story of modernization’s profound social costs.

In this landscape of disappearance, two starkly different models of endurance presented themselves. The first is the state-sanctioned, celebrated narrative of the ‘Byeongsan Seowon’, a magnificent 16th-century Confucian academy. As a UNESCO World Heritage site, it is impeccably preserved, its wooden halls radiating a timeless authority.

The Seowon Confucian academy

The Byeongsan Seowon deserves its accolades. This 16th-century Confucian academy has the kind of presence that makes anyone unconsciously adjust their posture. Walking through it with an interpreter who understand these spaces deeply, I kept thinking about how architecture can be an argument (and a statement). I wrote in my notebook: "philosophy you can stub your toe on”. This wooden building knows it will survive. It was built by people who assumed their worldview would outlast the wood they carved it into, and they weren't wrong. The state maintains it now because it tells a story worth telling, about scholarship, about tradition, about Korea's place in a global heritage conversation.

As a UNESCO World Heritage site, it is impeccably preserved, its wooden halls radiating a timeless authority. To walk its grounds is to move through a physical argument about power, discipline, and transcendence. Built by a powerful aristocratic clan to perpetuate an elite worldview, its endurance is guaranteed by the state. It tells a clean, dignified story of national identity that is legible, monumental, and globally valuable.

What Nobody Documents

The next day, I found the counter-narrative. I found the heritage that is not authorised.

Two small rural churches, officially registered but functionally forgotten! I felt, a photograph felt too flat to capture their condition, so I used photogrammetry, building 3D models not to replicate them, but to see if technology could offer a different way of witnessing.

The first church, Doyong gongso, was being reclaimed.

This model allows for a kind of forensic intimacy. You can move through the pews, still arranged for a congregation that will never return. You can zoom in on the chipped paint of a Virgin Mary statue or trace the exact paths where decades of hands have smoothed the grain on the wooden kneelers. These are the material records of embodied faith, the ghosts in the machine.

The 'Pumpkin' Church. (Give it a moment to load; the 3D view will appear shortly.)

This is not just decay; it is an ecological re-inscription, a story of how the land reclaims what people abandon. Circling with my camera and the drone, crouching and climbing, produced a model that lets you examine what photographs flatten: the exact texture of abandonment. You can zoom in on the Virgin Mary statue whose paint reveals three different attempts at localization, as European features, then Korean, then something uncertain between them. You can trace where decades of hands wore smooth the backs of pews that will never hold another congregation.

This isn't romantic ruin. It's what happens when the social contract breaks down so slowly that nobody notices until it's already broken. The vines aren't decorating, they're digesting.

I learnt later that for this chruch, Doyang Gongso, there is no exact record of its founding year. But it was in 1995, when the church was elevated to a parish under another cathedral. Due to a significant deciline in the rural population this Gongso has since been closed.

The second church was a statement of deliberate severance. It was 'Daejuk' Gongso. You may want to have a look at the brief of this very interesting abandonded gongso, preapred by my every energetic colleague Hyeon Ji.

The Daejuk Gongso, the church beside the cabbage field. (Give it a moment to load; the 3D view will appear shortly.)

Here in this 3d, the lock in the model, you can examine it from every angle. It's new-ish, maybe five years old. Someone chose this particular lock, purchased it, installed it. There was a last day, a final turning of the key. The model captures the building's perfect isolation: harvested fields stretching out, a road that sees more rain than tires.

This is what it looks like when a community quietly agrees that something is over.

Still, to me, the technology fails at the edges of experience. It can't capture the smell, mildew and old incense and something sweet-sick I never identified. It can't record how each church holds silence differently, how the Pumpkin Church whispers with leaves while the Locked Church swallows sound like a throat.

The Problem of Preserving Failure

Here's what keeps me up: these churches are valuable precisely because they're failing. Their decay is the most honest thing about them. They're documents of rural Korea's attempt to become modern on terms that were never quite its own, and then the abandonment of that attempt when the cities called everyone away.

To restore them would be a lie, imposing continuity where there is none, suggesting a future where there isn't one. But to let them disappear feels like complicity in erasure. They're inconvenient evidence, the kind that complicates clean narratives about development and progress.

Meanwhile, the Seowon endures, beautiful and eternal, maintained by the same state that let these villages empty out. It will outlive us all because it serves a need for continuity narratives, for stories about Korean culture that travel well in international committees and tourist brochures. The churches will disappear because they tell a different truth: that modernization is also a process of abandonment, that for every preserved monument there are ten thousand unpreserved failures.

On walking back from the churches alone, I saw cabbages growing through the asphalt.

Someone had planted them right in the cracks of the neglected road. Not in a garden, not in a field, but there in the broken pavement, like a dare.

I stood there for a brief time, thinking about preservation and persistence and the difference between them. My 3D models are good at capturing architecture in its dying light. They're excellent at preserving decay. But they can't document this, the decision to plant food in a crack, the kind of stubborn hope that exists outside any heritage framework.

That afternoon, while eating a quick-lunch of delightful shrimp-sandwitches before we catch our bus to Sejong, I tried to explain what I'd seen. We all work in heritage, we all know the gap between what gets saved and what gets lost. But I keep thinking about those vegetables growing through asphalt, about what we choose to document and what documents itself, about the difference between monuments and the opposite of monuments, the small, stubborn things that persist without permission, without funding, without anyone's authorization at all.

The Seowon has its UNESCO designation. The churches have their decay. And somewhere, if they survived the winter, those cabbages are growing through the cracks, indifferent to what we call heritage and what we don't.