National Bonsai Foundation

Korean Viewing Stones

For centuries, people in Asia have contemplated natural stones for creative inspiration and meditation. Large stones were incorporated into gardens to suggest distant landscape features. Smaller viewing stones, prized as natural artwork, were displayed inside on carved wood stands or in shallow basins filled with water or sand.

Viewing stones were typically found in surging rivers or along rough coastlines—anywhere wind, water and other forms of natural erosion slowly smoothed and shaped stones over thousands of years. The end results are stones of unique, recognizable shapes such as mountains, figures, or animals.

In Korea, viewing stones are called Suseok (“sue-suk”), a word which was originally written with two characters meaning “water-stone”, referring to the ideal, weathered quality of a good stone. More recently, the first character has been changed so that – although it has the same pronunciation — the term means “longevity-stone”, an object of endurance worthy of veneration in Korean culture.