우리시대의 그림 풍속화: 강세황의 비평활동과 김홍도의 행려풍속도

Abstract

Kang Sehwang (1713-1791), a representative literati painter in the eighteenth century of Joseon Korea, was also a leading art critic. Along with his own literary painting, his art criticism reveals his aesthetic consciousness, and furthermore his involvement with time and society in which he lived. It is in his art writing and criticism of the paintings of Kim Hongdo (1745-ca.1803) that we can explore the way in which Kang Sehwang understood and interacted with his time and society. Kang Sehwang wrote two Danwon-gi (writings of Danwon) for Kim Hongdo. Danwon was Kim Hongdo’s garden, meaning the garden in which birch tree planted, and also became Kim’s sobriquet name. Danwon-gi is a rare and exceptional biography of the professional painter from middle-class in Joseon dynasty. In the writings, Kang celebrated Kim Hongdo, “the painter who established a new stage in the four hundred years of Joseon paintings,” accomplished in all genres, including figures, landscapes, Buddhist and Daoist themes, as well as bird, flowers, and animals. However, it is the genre painting that Kang praised as the most remarkable achievement of Kim Hongdo, by noting that Kim’s genre paintings conveys contemporaneity in everyday life of Joseon people, the sense of liveliness in its detailed depictions, and humor and wit in its narratives. During the ten years that Kang Sehwang as an art critic and Kim Hongdo as a painter worked together, Kim Hongdo produced some of his most remarkable paintings, such as Painting on the Elegant Gathering in the Western Garden (1778), Pictorial Records of Travel (1778), Taoist Immortals in Eight Panels (1779), and so forth. And all of the paintings accompany with Kang’s inscriptions and their calligraphies are deeply related with the composition of the paintings. These works could be considered as their true collaboration, in which Kang’s inscriptions play an integral role both in the form and content of the works, thus could not be separated from the paintings. Kang Sehwang esteemed Kim Hongdo’s genre paintings that “it had not existed before.” Kang considered the genre painting as a portrait of his own time that differed from previous time, and the response to the newness of his era in art. In fact, prior to eighteenth century genre paintings existed but only regarded as vulgar subjects. Kang gave attention to the aesthetic value and the sense of contemporaneity of genre paintings, and offered criticisms in Kim Hongdo’s genre paintings. In this sense, Kang Sehwang can be evaluated as “the guardian of genre painting” in the eighteenth century Joseon dynasty.