The prevailing narrative of Korean art history defines the late Chosŏn period, and the eighteenth century in particular, as a time of self-discovery and cultural pride as well as of economic and cultural renaissance. While this picture has often been challenged in other disciplines, it has been perpetuated in modern Korean art history scholarship. Moreover, the scant amount, if not the lack, of comprehensive research in Western academia on Chosŏn painting has contributed to reinforcing such a portrayal outside of Korea.
These two outstanding books, both of which examine Chosŏn painting from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries, take a new look at a remarkable moment of cultural growth in Korean history. Bringing recent discussion under a novel interpretive lens, the two studies open a meaningful conversation and begin the long-overdue task of bringing to Korean painting as much critical attention as Chinese and Japanese art have long received. Commanding a variety of primary and secondary sources, they make major contributions to the study of Korean painting and more broadly to East Asian art.
Sunglim Kim tackles the longer time span (1700–1910), accompanied by an epilogue on the modern period, whereas J. P. Park's scope is more focused (1700–1850). While they overlap somewhat in coverage, their perspectives, narratives, and interests differ substantially. And although they both challenge academic conventions, their methods and focal points differ: Kim mainly examines the role of members of the chungin class who acted as middlemen between literati and professional painters, while Park primarily probes the changing desires and tastes of yangban elites.
The chungin were hereditary technical specialists who played key roles in societal changes and cultural transformation. In Flowering Plums and Curio Cabinets, Kim explains their internal hierarchies and emphasizes their growing status as a distinct social group. Most importantly, she calls for a more fluid and varied reading of the yangban-chungin cultural relationship, one that differs from the customary “teacher-follower” interpretation. For example, there is ample evidence of a symbiotic, flexible relationship between Kim Chŏnghŭi (1786–1856), the most prominent scholar-official artist of the time, and Yi Sangjŏk (1804–65), a Chinese-language chungin interpreter. One might speculate, nevertheless, that the source of authority was still Kim Chŏnghŭi and his scholarly ideal even while acknowledging that his Winterscape became a crown jewel of Korean literati painting as a result of the cultural prominence achieved through the help of his chungin acquaintances (Kim, p. 40).
The book's strength lies in Kim's typology and stylistic analysis of different subjects and in her critical review of previous research. She identifies two particular subjects of painting as exemplary types formed by chungin: a new theme, ch'aekkŏri, or still life with books; and one reinvented subject matter, flowering plums. Recognizing ch'aekkŏri as understudied and underappreciated in Western scholarship, she delves into their motifs and spatial experiments, reading them as a visual reference to the self-identity of chungin. Also notable are her explication of changes during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the concept of obsession with objects and her argument that ch'aekkŏri painting was a new visual type representing “an era of extraordinary material influx, vigorous cultural and artistic appropriation, and remarkable artistic experimentation” (Kim, p. 109). She then discusses the open art market flourishing at Kwangt'ong Bridge in late eighteenth-century Seoul. For Kim, then, the emergence of chungin as collectors, patrons, and finally art dealers who negotiated between painters and customers helped painting to permeate everyday life in the late Chosŏn.
By bringing to light quite a few personal letters and poems written by chungin, yangban, and sŏŏl (descendants of yangban men and their concubines), Kim provides a firsthand look into cultural desire and class awareness in order to support her observations on the commission, production, and consumption of paintings in late Chosŏn society. She interprets the plum tree blossom, for example, as a “subject through which chungin painters could distinguish themselves as a group and as individuals” (Kim, p. 145). This point is reinforced by introducing the innovative master of flowering plum paintings, Cho Hŭiryong (1789–1866). Here, however, one might wonder why the plum blossom was singled out as a representative motif to shape and consolidate chungin identity. Kim lists four major influences behind Cho's plum blossom paintings: Chinese paintings, books, and manuals; Buddhist and Daoist teachings; the search for chungin group identity through the theme; and market forces. Among them, the third factor, group identity, matters most for her argument; the others can be applied to different painting subjects of the time. While her reading of the multifaceted meanings of plum tree blossoms is discerning, one is curious about whether the theme's new expressive rendering was stylistic innovation or something more inherent and crucial to the painter's identity. Ultimately, reading Kim's book leads us to wonder: Can an art object really tell us something about the social status of its creator? Do we have the means to know the psychology of chungin through their paintings? What if the chungin ideals were simply similar to those of literati elites?
The last part of the book examines chungin art from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Here Kim provides a valuable sociopolitical overview of this tumultuous time and introduces prominent artists, scholars, and collectors. According to Kim, O Sech'ang (1864–1953), Ko Hŭidong (1886–1965), and Chŏn Hyŏngp'il (1906–62), as the epitome of the chungin group, eventually took center stage in the creation of the artistic culture of modern Korea.
To sum up, Kim diagnoses two prejudices that have hindered academic coverage of chungin art: the view that the nineteenth century marked a period of decline in Korean art on the one hand and the idealization of Kim Chŏnghŭi on the other. Her skepticism of the so-called Kim Chŏnghŭi School is legitimate, since there is no evidence of firm adherents or members of such a school. A question, however, still remains regarding how to situate the indisputable presence of Kim Chŏnghŭi in connection with the chungin artists and how to understand his dominance in the cultural realm during and after his time.
One interestingly divergent point in Kim and Park's interpretations regards King Chŏngjo (r. 1776–1800), the so-called “cultivated suzerain of the state” (Park, p. 69). Whereas Kim regards Chŏngjo as a positive force behind the development and popularity of ch'aekkŏri, as evinced by his establishment of the Kyujanggak, the royal library, and cultivation of the “court painters-in-attendance,” Park uses contemporary essays, poems, and historical accounts to highlight the disparity between genre paintings created for affluent patrons during his reign and the evidence of the harsh conditions experienced by poverty-stricken commoners. He thus presents a more complicated and multidimensional picture of King Chŏngjo by documenting the monarch's political strategy and incongruous interests in literature and art.
Park's A New Middle Kingdom is thought-provoking, not necessarily because of its theoretical approach or topics per se, but because of the materials he selects, dissects, and discusses. He begins by delineating late seventeenth- to early nineteenth-century modernity in the East Asian context in relation to that of the European world. This comparative perspective continues throughout the book. Park introduces the late Chosŏn society's competing worldviews, namely “contradictions between traditional and modern; acceptance and rejection,” (Park, p. 45) an approach similar to Kim's analysis of the persistent struggle between the move toward a consumer culture and “the Chosŏn Confucian conscience” (Kim, p. 3). In Park's study, however, the contrasts are more extensively discussed: between a more democratized social system and neo-Confucian conservatism, between the ruling class shifting toward social reform and conventional beliefs rejecting it, and between the appreciation of education and leisure by a broader audience and their criticism by a privileged elite.
Then Park tackles two types of late Chosŏn painting, genre painting and true view landscape. Whereas Kim sheds substantial light on hitherto under-researched subjects, Park critically revisits the most acclaimed ones. First, Park questions whether genre paintings, much praised as an authentic and humorous expression of Korean culture, indeed genuinely represented the reality of people's lives, including those of commoners. His criticism targets earlier explanations for the genre's popularity, namely cultural pride, practical learning (sirhak), and the influx of similar scenes from Chinese books and images. Highlighting the lack of concrete evidence, he warns against “academic nationalism and analytical positivism” (Park, p. 99). Moreover, by comparing the historical records of economic deterioration and injustices, Park reveals the disparity between the written and painted world, with the latter naturalizing class inequality. In his view, genre painting from this era is not pictorial evidence of prosperity and peace, but rather a “critical piece of dialectical proof of the social conflict, destitution, and misfortune present in early modern Korea” (Park, p. 99).
In a similar vein, Park does not regard true view landscape as a neutral depiction of real scenery or as a faithful reproduction of trendy tours, travel literature, or the rediscovery of Korea's natural beauty. Rather it is testimony to the elites’ insecurities and the upstarts’ aspirations, with members of both groups aiming to become “authentic gentlemen of true originality” (Park, p. 106) by displaying a carefree and artistic ethos. By adopting the “archaeology of cultural landscape” as a methodological rubric, Park details how the scenes in true view landscapes were chosen to reinforce the social structure or to announce one's status to the community at large (Park, p. 101). He traces the genealogy of new types of architectural spaces such as elite villas and estates, scholars’ studios, and the “nine bends” tradition, and then reads them as surrogate portraitures for socioeconomic conditions and cultural identity.
Park's expertise in Chinese art books, painting manuals, and prints is of great value in a chapter on Chosŏn artists’ misinformation and misapprehension. As scholars have noted, such misunderstanding, a critical part of cross-cultural translation, is another venue of creative activity (Park, pp. 155, 238). For example, the seventeenth-century Master Gu's Painting Album, The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Paintings, and other art books read by the urban middle class or social upstarts in China were enthusiastically hailed as high art by elite painters in eighteenth-century Korea. Here, however, analysis of how such misreading sparked meaningful innovation in Chosŏn paintings, as Park argues, would have benefited from concrete examples.
The last chapter, “Rescuing Art History from the Nation,” arrives at uneasy and controversial territory: the unspoken but tenacious presence of the nationalistic view of art history within East Asian scholarship. Park proposes, for example, a closer and more precise reading of the documents that modern Korean scholarship has recognized as evidence that the Japanese held Chosŏn art in high esteem. Park shows evidence and reasoning for both the Japanese audience's respect and demand for Chosŏn art and its disinterest and disdain, combined with ethnocentrism, in the Edo period. Park also demonstrates that Chosŏn painters saw Japanese paintings as another source of inspiration, like European and Chinese paintings, which disputes the view that Koreans’ sense of cultural superiority blocked their interest in Japanese art.
Richly detailed, comprehensively resourced, and meticulously researched, both books call into question existing narratives on Chosŏn painting by reading artworks in consideration of their collective agency and their roles in negotiating values, taste, and status at a critical historical juncture. These compelling studies will hence contribute significantly to the literature and ultimately enrich scholarly discussion of early modernity in East Asia. Furthermore, Kim's appendix of English translations of poems and letters from the late Chosŏn period (Kim, pp. 233–40), as well as both books’ up-to-date bibliographies that include Asian and Western references, will be of great use to students and researchers in various disciplines.
