사실주의의 시대: 조선 후기 회화와 ‘즉물사진(卽物寫眞)’

Abstract

Late Joseon Korea witnessed great enthusiasm among painters and scholars for realistic renderings of things. The use and transmission of evidential methods were strongly encouraged and the quest for certainty and accuracy was highly celebrated. The search for empirically verifiable knowledge ushered in the age of realism. Practical learning played a key role in fostering interest in European science and technology. Korean envoys to Beijing also made a major contribution to the introduction and circulation of Western curiosities and novelties. They brought numerous books and some of the trending Western scientific instruments to Korea and laid the foundation for the rise of Western learning. The study of the West gradually became fashionable among a group of young scholars who had dissent views on the China-centered world. The nation-wide tendency to closely represent or simulate real life or real things in painting indicates that the notion of lifelikeness was at the heart of the artistic discourse of eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Korea. Painters used meticulous brushwork and Western shading techniques in rendering figures and things in a remarkably realistic manner. Yi Myeong’gi (1756-after 1802) emerged as the best portraitist of the time, producing astonishingly realistic portraits that captured accurately the external physical features of the sitters. He employed Western shading techniques indepicting the sitter’s face and garment. Especially he showed extraordinary draftsmanship in carefully and painstakingly drawing and shading the sitter’s face to the extent that the subject looked as if he was alive. Portrait of O Jaesun by Yi, ca. 1791, now in the Samsung Museum of Art, LEEUM, best exemplifies how the painter’s faithful portrayal of O’s actual physical likeness makes the sitter appear to be sitting before us. The use of Western shading techniques played a key role in enhancing the degree of realism in painting. It must be noted, however, that the adoption of Western pictorial techniques was not the prerequisite for realistic paintings. Such Japanese masters as Maruyama Okyo¯ (1733-1795), Tani Buncho¯ (1763-1840), and Watanabe Kazan (1793-1841),all equipped with Western pictorial idioms, failed to produce lifelike, highly realistic portraits. This means that Western modeling techniques acted as a catalyst for the popularity of realistic paintings, but they were not necessarily required for painters to achieve likenesses in painting. What was more crucial in the currency of realistic paintings was the social fervor for lifelikeness in painting. Social and cultural discourse on lifelikeness enabled Korean painters to create remarkably realistic paintings. Scholars’ Accoutrements by Yi Hyeongrok (1808-?), now in the Samsung Museum of Art, LEEUM, presents a panorama of books, brushes, ink sticks, inkstones, rolled-up scrolls, ancient bronzes and ceramics, and other objects arranged on bookshelves that show the illusion of space, mass, and volume. The semblance of reality in the painting is so heightened that the viewer can often be fooled into accepting what appears to be a surprising likeness. The widespread social demand for lifelike paintings led Yi to create such a visually captivating work.