The Measure of the World: Scenes from a Journey to Kaesŏng

Abstract

In 1757, the scholar Kang Se-hwang (1713-91) documented his trip to Kaesong (formerly known as Songdo) in an album that has since become one of the most celebrated groups of paintings in the history of late Choson art. Known as Journey to Kaesong, the album has been particularly recognized for its incorporation of linear perspective and other techniques associated with Western-style oil painting. Yet even more significant was how Kang treated scale, defined in this context the deliberate calibration of objects according to size. The vast majority of Choson paintings used scale primarily as a means to make visible abstract ideas such as infinity and vastness, often taking as a standard the kinds of relational frameworks used in inkbrush painting since the early Song Dynasty. In Journey to Kaesong, however, both the physical scale determined by the album format and the pictorial scale internal to the depiction are used to generate viewing experiencies that induce in audiences a sense of immediacy, one that enabled the possibility of imaginig the world beyond the geographic, aesthetic, political and social hierarchies prevalent at the time the work was first made and shown.