In 1728, the fourth year of his fifty-two-year reign, King Yeongjo's army confronted an attempted coup. Fueled by the growth of conspiracy theories surrounding the sudden death of Yeongjo's half brother, King Gyeongjong, the rebellion was led by disaffected members of oppositional factions, some of them high-ranking officials within the royal court itself. The conflict was violent but brief; after less than three weeks of fighting, the army that had been raised and the territories that had been seized were returned to the Crown, along with the severed heads of the opposition leaders.A recent exhibit at San Francisco's Asian Art Museum shed light on the political impact of this event on Yeongjo's strategy for governance, focusing on specially commissioned portraits and material objects associated with the aftermath of the insurrection.1 At the same time, the exhibit advanced awareness of Joseon-era portraiture, an artistic genre that has received very little scholarly attention. Three aspects were emphasized: the elaborate process involved in preparing for and creating official portraits during the Joseon dynasty; the use of such portraits to advance the Crown's agenda through promoting Confucian veneration of model citizens and familial ancestors; and the technique of applying reverse coloring to the back side of an image—a process reserved for Buddhist iconography when first employed during the previous Goryeo dynasty—to add a luminous quality to paintings of secular subjects. The reverse coloring procedure, aside from being distinctively Korean, is a testament to the extreme care taken in creating these portraits, specifically with a political purpose. Although reverse coloration is not evident when a painting is displayed as intended, the museum's creative installation provided equal access to both front and back of several examples, with dual labels directing viewers’ attention toward details they could see, but that would be impossible to see from the other side. The display, which was augmented by art and material objects on loan from Korean sources but at its heart drew upon examples from the Asian Art Museum's own collection, was physically and thematically centered around eight rare ink-on-paper draft portraits that dominated the center of the gallery (figure 1).The historical context of the pictures sheds light on King Yeongjo's reaction to the crisis that threatened his sovereignty. To commend the loyalty of his senior officers and publicly assert his legitimacy as Korea's ruler when the hostilities ended, Yeongjo ordered the creation of an official Bureau for Recording Meritorious Deeds and Awards. The bureau's immediate task was to record the preparation and process of appointing fifteen martial leaders who had been particularly instrumental in putting down the rebellion as Bunmu Gongsin, a newly minted term that referred to their status as “renowned military.”2 The Bunmu honorees were rewarded with a permanent raise of one or more social ranks for themselves and their families, valuable gifts of land and household goods, and invitations to a ceremonial banquet where the king bestowed upon them calligraphic decrees in his own hand and official portraits of each of them that had been commissioned for the occasion: two copies, one to take home, and a duplicate to be retained for the royal records in a special hall on the palace grounds.3 Painted from life by a group of nine specially appointed court artists, accomplished in several stages over the course of four months with critical input from King Yeongjo and his advisors as the work progressed, these portraits established a visual record of the Bunmu officials’ personal link with the throne. In accordance with the Confucian ideology that permeated Joseon-era politics, the portraits would take on an important ritual role in ancestral commemoration ceremonies for generations to come, strengthening the spiritual connection between the honored men and their descendants; thus, including their likenesses as part of the endowment was at least as important to the honorees’ families as the property that came along with those portraits.Since the foundation of the Joseon dynasty in 1392, only twenty-eight cohorts of meritorious subjects were recorded. The fifteen men in 1728 would be the last. The lack of any further such elevations is a sign of cultural strength rather than decline; that another group of Bunmu Gongsin was unnecessary indicates improved political stability in the years that followed.4Seventeenth-century Korean politics had been chaotic. King Yeongjo's father, King Sukjong, successfully steered his way through decades of cutthroat maneuvers and palace intrigue, partly by finding opportunities to reinforce his sovereignty through powerful symbolic gestures. Judiciously using royal portraits to demonstrate his legitimate dynastic succession to the throne, showcasing the accomplishments of his predecessors, and tacitly promising more of the same, were all significant elements of his strategy. In 1688, when the court was enmeshed in a particularly vicious struggle surrounding the question of succession, Sukjong emphasized his authority by commissioning a copy of an official portrait of the Joseon dynasty's founder and enshrining it amidst much pomp and circumstance in a purpose-built hall at the capital, alongside those of other notable kings. More controversially, in 1695, Sukjong revived the custom—neglected for centuries—of sitting for a portrait from life, a move that horrified courtiers who “strongly opposed the idea of subjects bowing before a portrait of the living monarch” due to its close proximity to those of his predecessors who were honored during mandated ceremonial rituals.5King Yeongjo followed his father's example and built upon it further by commissioning a new, updated portrait of himself once every decade throughout his long reign, recording his current appearance as the years went by.6 The activity surrounding the creation and installation of any new portrait served as a reminder of his lineage and legitimacy as ruler, which perhaps is why updated half-length versions of the 1728 Bunmu portraits were produced in 1751.7 When compared with the originals, these later versions show signs of aging in the men who were still living at the time, evidence that, like King Yeongjo's portraits, they were probably drawn from life. The posthumous portraits had to be copied from the 1728 originals but were otherwise treated the same as the new ones, going through the same process of draft and critique before the final version was painted on a silk canvas. At this point, approved drafts were usually destroyed, as their purpose had been served. Remarkably, in this case, eight of the paper drafts are still extant, and it is these 1751 versions that survive in the Asian Art Museum's collection. The survival of any drafts, much less a matched set of eight, is extremely unusual.Because of the politicized nature of the portraits, critics of Joseon art, until very recently, have valued formal portraiture below iconographic religious painting and “literati art,” brush-and-ink depictions of landscapes with spiritual resonance that were usually embellished with poetic inscriptions and the artist's seal and signature. Since the methods and materials employed for literati-produced poetic compositions and pictorial scrolls were identical—ink and paper combined with calligraphy, though sometimes a pale color wash would be added for effect—the two activities were traditionally linked with the Confucian ideal of the amateur gentleman scholar. Such artistic efforts were judged by their contemporaries according to the vigor and elegance of the brushwork and the depth of their allusive resonance rather than by purely visual standards.Portraits, on the other hand, were evaluated entirely on aesthetic principles, with an emphasis on the need for absolute realism. The 1728 portraits and their updated 1751 copies embodied the Confucian value of fidelity, a testament to the loyalty of the Bunmu officials themselves, but also a commitment to produce a faithful likeness, literally “warts and all,” that would embody the spirit of the original. The aim was to convey the appearance and personality of the sitter as accurately and as clearly as possible, rather than drawing attention to the skill of the hand that depicted him.8 Individual creative expression was to be avoided, and, unlike many of their western counterparts, Korean portraitists of the eighteenth century did not flatter their subjects; for instance, the portrait of Oh Myeonghang, reproduced as figure 2, faithfully conveys not just his dignity and honors, but also his chicken pox scars, as well as a dark yellow discoloration in his skin and eyes that are signs of the liver disease, probably cirrhosis, that claimed his life less than a year later (figures 3 and 4).9 These features are evident in all three extant versions of Oh's Bunmu portrait: the full-length and half-length versions on silk, and the paper draft in the museum collection. Similarly, the face of his fellow Bunmu officer Lee Sam—in Lee's official portrait, but also in a less formal image that depicts him in a casual pose, clad in military field attire—is marked by a network of wrinkles and a distinctive hair-sprouting mole that a western artist might have tactfully excluded, or at least deemphasized.Portrait painters appointed by the court were considered craftsmen rather than creative artists; frequently, their works were collaborative and the finished products were usually left unsigned.10 Although their work was acknowledged as highly important in maintaining the image of the current administration, especially during the turbulent years of the long eighteenth century, that importance was grounded in practical considerations and thus tended to be undervalued by connoisseurs of the fine arts. Such traditional Korean portraits, having been overlooked for centuries, deserve some scholarly attention. The 2021 exhibit at San Francisco's Asian Art Museum was the first significant exhibition on Korean portraiture ever featured in the United States; even in Korea, the first major exhibit that focused on the subject was in 2008 at the Gyeonggi Provincial Museum, which houses many important portraits from the Joseon period.11Additionally, study of Joseon-era portraiture has been hampered by the custom of giving portraits of prominent figures to their families to be treated as objects of veneration, not just valuable heirlooms, but as a spiritual conduit to one's ancestral past. Such works are not casually lent or donated to collections. Specialists in this genre might find themselves crisscrossing the country with multiple letters of introduction in hand if they wanted to view certain representative specimens, and might hope to find descendants generous enough to lend their pictures or related materials.12Some descendants have been very generous indeed. In the Likeness and Legacy exhibit, most of the material objects that add personal dimension to the portraits were lent by the family of Lee Sam, who served as the military training commander during the 1728 insurrection. The Lee family's contribution to the exhibition included a commemorative engraved silver cup and saucer in an elaborate wooden case, King Yeongjo's gift, and several highly ornamental examples of the king's calligraphic decrees as he continued his patronage throughout Lee's career. The documents included a detailed reckoning of the honors and endowments associated with the Bunmu Gongsin ceremonies of 1728, and a carved plaque declaring Lee's appointment in 1731 as mayor of the capital city at Hanseong (now Seoul).13 The family also lent their copy of the 1751 album in which Lee's portrait was bound along with his fellow Bunmu official Cho Hyeonmyeong's description of how the portrait-recreation project was carried out, information that enabled the curators to identify the date of the drafts in their collection. According to Cho's account, although Lee Sam himself had passed away in 1735, his son, Lee Hi'il, oversaw the operation.The most eye-catching item on loan from the Lee family collection, normally housed in the Baekje Military Museum, was a colorful portrait of Lee Sam in military field dress mounted on a silk hanging scroll. His face is recognizable from the draft and completed Bunmu portraits, but the pose is notably more casual and the composition is much more elaborate, with a background of rocks and trees, an example of China's influence on Korean artists. Unlike their Chinese contemporaries, Joseon-dynasty portraitists in Korea seldom provided any background other than a floor mat and a decorative chair, concentrating the viewer's attention entirely on the face and indicators of status. This was especially true of court painters, whose mission was to render an accurate view of an individual human's nature rather than to depict the natural world. The elaborate patterns of the silk robes worn by the sitters in the Bunmu portraits are faithfully reproduced as an indication of the subject's wealth and good taste, but convention dictated the uniform shape of the clothing and the formal pose of the sitters. They all face slightly to their right, a typical posture in official Joseon-era portraits, and in the full-length versions, they sit on the same chair covered with a leopard skin. They wear robes with round necks and long sleeves that conceal their hands—a sign of reverence—and black silk or horsehair hats with rank badges featuring tigers (indicating they were military officials), or a crane-and-cloud motif (the badge of a scholar-official, which military officers sometimes adopted for special occasions). Half-length official portraits generally provide no background at all, though the flat space that surrounds the sitter might be decorated with an inscription describing his honors or the occasion.The anomalous picture of Lee Sam echoes the other depictions of him in the angle and details of the face, suggesting that the artist was familiar with the Bunmu portrait, though Lee appears older here (figure 5). Otherwise, the picture resembles its official counterparts only in that it contains a calligraphic message in one corner, though in this case, it merely identifies the subject and the artist: “General Lee, painted by Cheongdam.”14 Lee is depicted as a quintessential leader in service of the state, clad in a military sleeveless vest and jeonbok style hat topped with a valuable jade ornament. His hands are not only visible, but imbued with purpose. His left hand draws attention to a knife attached to his belt, ready for action, and his right hand clasps a whip, the baton of a commander.15 Perched on the branch beside him is a vigilant hawk, a popular metaphor for a military officer's protective function because of the bird's association with an ability to spot intruders from a great distance and react swiftly and strategically.16This association of Lee Sam with strategic skill is particularly apt in light of his reputation as a wily character, with a checkered history that made his inclusion among the Bunmu honorees—and, indeed, his very survival—a controversial decision. He had ties by marriage with the insurrectionists, and there had been rumors for years that his loyalties were divided, though King Yeongjo valued Lee's considerable talents enough to be willing to overlook his advisors’ misgivings. Even before Lee was appointed to serve as the army's military training commander, he was already under a cloud of suspicion, having recently returned from two years in exile. When it became evident during interrogations of captured rebel soldiers that several members of the king's inner circle were double agents, Lee's name came up repeatedly in the prisoners’ confessions as a potential fifth columnist. He narrowly escaped interrogation and possible execution by means of a theatrical gesture that proved his skill as a political operator, when during the height of the crisis, he showed the king a hidden message he had written on the palm of his hand to implicate some of the other officials who were present in that very room. Later, over the objections of the cabinet, Yeongjo promoted Lee to the position of minister of war.17Other Bunmu officers have equally interesting stories. The scholarly Cho brothers, Munmeyong and Hyeonmyeong, tutored King Yeongjo's sons, and the elder of the two, Munmeyong, preceded Lee Sam as minister of war. The younger Cho eventually rose to the rank of prime minister. Although he too had been accused of collusion with the rebel forces, Pak Munsu spearheaded Yeongjo's anti-corruption campaign as the administration tried to unite the divided country through a new coalition government. “Secret Inspector Pak Munsu” eventually evolved into a folk hero, today a popular figure in historical drama series and children's animated programs. Pak Chansin, who served as leader of the central army at the height of his success, was less fortunate: after his relationship with the rebel leader was proven, he was beheaded and deprived of his honor; his portraits were destroyed. Taken together, a survey of the future careers of the meritorious officials provides a fascinating glimpse of the reforming spirit that shaped Korean society in the wake of the 1728 crisis.A further glimpse into Korean culture through the artists’ craft was provided by the opportunity to observe the normally invisible work that went into reverse coloration, a technique used for both sketches and final portraits (figure 6). Although the paper on which the 1751 drafts were drawn has darkened over the years to a brittle brown, originally the drafts would have been sketched in charcoal, then later traced with ink, on semitransparent yellow paper that had been oiled to mimic the properties of untreated silk. Paint would be applied to the back of the paper to test the effect of various shades of pink and white in the area corresponding to the face and throat, enhancing the luminosity of the complexion. Since the portraitist could see through the paper, the back side of the sheet could be employed to experiment with shapes before arriving at a final decision recorded on the front. Behind the Lee Sam draft, for example, one can track how the artist traced the line of one shoulder multiple times before arriving at exactly the right angle, which is delineated on the front with white paint—a remarkable degree of care, considering the sitter had died fifteen years earlier, and a further sign that rather than mere copies, these re-created versions were meant to be entirely new depictions.Once the team had satisfied the king and his advisors, the drafts were traced again, this time onto the permanent silk background. Reverse coloration was employed here, too, though no longer for the purpose of experimentation; since the opaque pigments behind the image are seen filtered through the weave of the silk, as opposed to being applied merely on top, the result is a subtler play of color and fewer visible brushstrokes. The process has the additional virtue of protection from damage by sunlight or exfoliation, since a backing was applied to the finished product and the paint behind the picture could avoid exposure. King Yeongjo, especially, was interested in the possibilities of reverse coloration, not just for its impact on the viewer, but also for its potential for preservation. In 1735, he lamented how “over time, all of the color pigments of the portraits of famous military commanders have worn away, since the faces were only painted on the front.”18The use of reverse coloration was not an eighteenth-century innovation, nor even specific to the Joseon era. Versions of the technique had been employed in China and, more extensively, by Korea's Goryeo dynasty, to enhance religious icons. Since the overtly Buddhist power base of the Goryeo had been eliminated, along with many of its politically important artworks, by their conquering Joseon successors and Korea's subsequent realignment toward a Confucian emphasis on social hierarchy and ancestral lineage, portraits assumed a ritual importance that took on the tenor of religious observance.When the Museum of Asian Art acquired the Bunmu portrait drafts in 1992, they were bound together in an album and were not in displayable condition due to contamination and deterioration, so they languished for years in the museum's study collection before curators realized exactly what they were. In 2012, with the support of the National Research Institute of Cultural Heritage in Korea, the album was sent to Korea for conservation treatment, and each portrait was returned to its original format as individual sheets with the backing removed. Now the fragile drafts can be displayed between walls of glass that encourage viewers to examine both front and back, enabling a glimpse of the painter's craft that has been hidden for three centuries.The second room of the Likeness and Legacy in Korean Portraiture exhibit provided context and contrast for the first, featuring Joseon-dynasty material goods from the museum's permanent collection and modern Korean art works on loan that engaged in a visual commentary on the official narrative next door. Among the ceramic materials was an enormous, spherical stark white “moon jar,” a form that was produced only during the long eighteenth century and beloved by scholars because it “embodied the aesthetics of simplicity and elegance sanctioned by Confucianism, the state ideology of the time.”19 Nearby, a blue-and-white porcelain vessel depicted a pipe-smoking tiger seated under a tree (figure 7), a reference to the traditional introduction to Korean children's stories: “Once upon a time, long, long ago, when the tiger smoked a pipe . . . ” Its folksy whimsicality seems at odds with the formality in the portrait room, though just such a vase might well have been seen by one of the sitters, or even owned by one of them. “The size of the jar,” which is pretty large, though not as impressive as the moon jar, “and ample use of cobalt suggest that the vessel was made for the court or the elite class, since contemporary records indicate that cobalt was more expensive than gold.”20 Like the striking portrait of Lee Sam relaxing beneath a similar tree, the presence of the smoking tiger might serve as a reminder that despite the official portraitist's directive to capture the spirit of the sitter, there is always much left unsaid.On the subject of things left unsaid, the modern installations juxtaposed against the Joseon pieces created a thoughtful counterpoint. Do Ho Suh's Uni-Form/s: Self Portraits/s: My 39 Years (2006) displayed a tidy row of ten uniforms, lined up by size, worn by the artist from kindergarten, through his school years, to his time in mandatory military service. Meant as a self-portrait to comment on how membership in various groups formed the man he eventually became, the uniforms’ distinguishing badges took on a historical dimension in the context of the cranes and tigers so proudly emblazoned on the breasts of the honored Bunmu officials.21 The most recent work in the exhibit, Yun Suknam's imagined image of the celebrated Joseon-era courtesan poet Yi Maechang, was completed in 2019. Yun is considered the pioneer of Korean feminist art, and her depictions of historical figures, both famous and nameless, address the absence of female subjects in traditional paintings. An especially moving example is Genealogy II, Yun's mixed media portrayal of two women in traditional dress placed in front of a backdrop of pages taken from an actual genealogy book. The first woman's rich adornment and bold head-on seated pose, strikingly similar to that of the official portraits, declare her to be a successful mother. Her simply clad childless counterpart dangles from a noose, a reference to the countless women who took their own lives when they were unable to carry out their duty to sustain the family lineage. “Ironically,” the label beside it points out, “whether women produced sons or not, their own names were never listed in the genealogies.”22The Likeness and Legacy in Korean Portraiture exhibit was curated by Associate Curator of Korean Art Hyonjeong Kim Han. Lead financial support was provided through a gift in memory of Suno Kay Osterweis and support from the Korea Foundation, Sulwhasoo, Hagen Choi, and the National Endowment for the Arts. The catalog is a handsome volume with a wealth of photographs, five essays by specialists on the portraits and their historical context, and helpful bibliographies that point toward further information on several subjects. A fine and affordable addition to a university library or a personal collection, the book can be purchased from the Asian Art Museum's website or directly from its publisher, the University of Hawai'i Press.