Flowering Plums and Curio Cabinets: The Culture of Objects in Late Chosŏn Korean Art by Sunglim Kim, and: A New Middle Kingdom: Painting and Cultural Politics in Late Chosŏn Korea (1700–1850) by J. P. Park

Abstract

Reviewed by: Flowering Plums and Curio Cabinets: The Culture of Objects in Late Chosŏn Korean Art by Sunglim Kim, and: A New Middle Kingdom: Painting and Cultural Politics in Late Chosŏn Korea (1700–1850) by J. P. Park Yoonjung Seo Sunglim Kim, Flowering Plums and Curio Cabinets: The Culture of Objects in Late Chosŏn Korean Art (Seattle: Univ. of Seattle Press, 2018). Pp. 304; 80 color illus., 18 b/w illus., 1 map. $65.00 cloth. J. P. Park, A New Middle Kingdom: Painting and Cultural Politics in Late Chosŏn Korea (1700–1850) (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 2018). Pp. 296; 93 color illus. $65.00 cloth. As a field of research, Korean art history is relatively young. It has grown rapidly over the last five decades: ritual, social, and political contexts have been investigated, period styles have been defined, canonical works have been identified, and important subjects and iconography have been discerned. Among scholars of Korean art, however, the nationalistic ideology that Korean art uniquely represents “Korean-ness” remains deeply entrenched, causing aesthetic value and style to be seen as expressions of national spirit and suggesting that the cultural essence of Korean art remains unchanged throughout history. This tendency has left little room for modernist or postmodernist theory, argumentation, questioning of social contexts, or consideration of a more nuanced role for Korea in East Asia. Sunglim Kim’s Flowering Plums and Curio Cabinets and J.P. Park’s A New Middle Kingdom are timely and valuable contributions to our understanding of the complex problems that Korean art historians have faced for decades. The authors tackle the issues of social class, the art market, nationalism, and cultural identity in the visual and material culture of the eighteenth-century Chosŏn dynasty, an era marked by economic and cultural efflorescence. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical perspectives, both authors offer insightful analyses of paintings along with examination of literary sources such as contemporaneous poems, diaries, letters, correspondence, and travel accounts. Sunglim Kim’s Flowering Plums and Curio Cabinets investigates the roles of the chungin, an upper-middle-class group of lesser bureaucrats and well-educated technical specialists, in the development of the art market and material culture of the late Chosŏn period (1700–1910). Kim calls into question “the traditional binary system” that categorizes Korean artists as either amateur literati or professional court painters and overlooks the existence of the chungin (7). Underscoring the role of the chungin as creators and consumers of artwork and as connoisseurs and tastemakers, Kim explores two related subjects—ch’aekkŏri screens and flowering plum paintings. Kim’s stylistic analysis and iconographical research shed light on chungin artists’ innovation of new subjects and styles as well as their commercial stimulation of late Chosŏn art. The first chapter opens with the chungins’ attempts to form a collective identity through cultural activities, including creating poetry societies, collecting art, pursuing painting and calligraphy, and acting as connoisseurs, dealers, and patrons, activities pursued with the goal of creating new genres as self-expression and a new group identity. Countering long-standing assumptions of a rigid unilateral relationship between the ruling yangban aristocrats and the secondary chungin class, Kim offers a complex reading of these groups’ relationships as exemplified by the careers of Kim Chŏnghŭi (1768–1856), the eminent yangban scholar artist, and Yi Sangjŏk (1804–1865), a Chinese-Korean chungin interpreter. According to Kim, [End Page 395] their relationship was not simply that of “yangban-teacher and chungin-follower” but rather “a fluid association, mutually dependent and beneficial with reciprocal exchanges of material, services, and artistic and monetary rewards” (41). Chapter 2 turns to ch’aekkŏri screens, opening with description of their role as a reflection of their owner’s social status, knowledge, wealth, and cultural sophistication. Ch’aekkŏri screens’ representation of still lives with books made them a genre newly invented by chungin painters, one that in Kim’s view bespeaks their owners’ attachment to “material culture and self-expression through peculiar obsessions” (29). The extraordinary material culture, avid cultural and artistic expression, and innovative artistic experimentation with European painting techniques that are reflected in ch...