Collecting and Writing about Literati Painting during the Early Chosŏn Period

Abstract

Art has been examined in regard to its political, socio-economic, and cultural contexts. Questions of how patrons and how the gender and social standing of artists have manipulated art production, or how art was displayed or used as a means of communication and self-representation in a certain environment by certain groups of people have been raised. These new approaches better allow us to see Korean art under a new perspective – rather than seeing Korean artists as “d pendent on Chinese imports”. We can now investigate how they used Chinese trends as inspiration for their artistic expressions based on their own intellectual and cultural needs. This article focuses on early Chosŏn painting, in particular An Kyŏn’s handscroll Dream Journey to the Peach Blossom Land of 1447 and Sin Sukchu’s text Hwagi or Record on Painting of 1445 in order to show how the cultural elite related to theoretical discourses, iconographies, and styles of ancient China Dream Journey to the Peach Blossom Land is based on a poem by Tao Qian (Yuanming, 365-427). His prose poem Journey to the Peach Blossom Spring presents what is probably the most beautiful Chinese image of paradise. This is partly reflected in the painting, but it does not follow Tao Qian’s poem and, for that matter, established Chinese iconography. While this is undoubtedly a reference to the Chinese literati tradition it can also be read in the context of the political situation of the writer, as a case of “Weltflucht,” of fleeing or avoiding the world. Stylistically Dream Journey to the Peach Blossom Land follows the Li-Guo school with its typically fantastic mountain shapes, curve outlines thickening and thinning with every turn of the brush, and its light effects. Sin Sukchu’s introduction recalling Han Yu and Bo Juyi and his philosophical discourse at the end of Hwagi echoing the thought of Su Shi concord well with Prince Anp’yŏng’s antiquarian taste, An Kyŏn’s painting style and general intellectual and cultural trends of their times. Knowledge of the style, the iconography, the literary genre of writing about art collecting and of aesthetics reached scholars and painters on the Korean peninsula sometime during the Koryŏ period. By the early Chosŏn, this knowledge had become the practical and theoretical repertoire of the cultural elite from which they could select and use whatever they felt appropriate to shape their own identities and assert their social, intellectual and political position.