Often called the patron saint of painting, and also Gyeomjae, a pseudonym meaning 'to cultivate oneself humbly', the artist Jeong Seon (1676-1759) is a household name in Korea as one of the most influential landscape painters in the 18th century. He is renowned as the first Korean painter of the time to break from the Chinese tradition of idealised landscape and to develop his own realist approach. Based on sketching from nature in which he immersed himself, though, his paintings do not depict scenery as he saw it but in a way that captures its genuine essence. It is said that Mt. Geumgang that he represented looks more real than what it actually is before our eyes.
One of the highlights in the exhibition Cosmos in brushstrokes is an album that consists of his twenty-one paintings in various genres. It was kept in St. Ottilien Archabbey in Emming, Bavaria, Germany for 80 years. In 2006 the German Benedictine monastery gave the album back to Korea. It was returned to St. Benedict Waegwan Abbey in southern Korea on permanent loan. The conditions are that it should be stored safely in a proper facility and that the Korean abbey, not the Korean government, should have the right over it. The album is being shown to the public for the first time.
IN JEONG SEON'S ALBUM (PHOTO: KBS)
The paintings were taken from Korea to Germany in 1925 by Nobert Weber (1870-1956), the abbot of St. Ottilien Archabbey. He visited Korea in 1911 and travelled all over the country for four months. He was keen on exploring the life and folk culture of ordinary Korean people like an ethnographer, if for a missionary purpose. His attitude was in tune with salvage ethnography, lamenting that many traditional cultural forms had already disappeared under the Japanese colonial rule and assuming that his pen and photographs could seize the last moments of what would be disappearing soon. From the field travels, he produced a journal, drawings and 290 photographs, which were published in a 400 page long book『Im Lande der Morgenstille』in 1915.
In 1925 he paid his second visit to Korea accompanied by a cinematographer, and recorded different parts of the country in a black-and-white silent film with the same title as the book, which amounts to 15km rolls and 116min runtime. One of what this film features is a potters' village formed by early Korean Catholics who fled from religious persecution and became potters and pottery dealers for a living. The film also spares nearly 10 minutes for a traditional Korean funeral which was commissioned by Weber himself. He had been much impressed by the funeral tradition encountered in his first visit to Korea, and written about it in detail for 10 pages in his book. He came to spend a large sum of money in arranging a whole village people to re-enact its entire process for filming. We can get a sense too in the film how he and his missionaries tried to get on with and assimilate into local communities.
During this travel, he came to Mt. Geumgang, and dazzled by its natural scenery, he made himself drawings and watercolours. It was there that he encountered Jeong Seon's landscapes. In a hotel where he stayed, a Japanese art dealer put on display a good few paintings of Mt. Geumgang for sale. Whereas Weber did not like Japanese paintings that were highly stylised, he appreciated Jeong Seon's as representing the Korean landscape in a very Korean way. He saw Jeong Seon's pictures capturing the aura of the whole mountain, not at the expense of detailed depiction of the scenery's elements in each own true space. It is believed that he hence purchased Jeong Seon's paintings, and brought them with him when he returned to his homeland.
The Missionary Museum of St. Ottilien Archabbey is one of the ten museums in Germany which house Korean art. It maintains a separate section displaying about 400 items from Korea. The existence of Jeong Seon's album here was first reported to academia in the 1970s by Korean art historian Yoo Joonyoung. After realising the album’s value, the German abbey strived to preserve its original state. In the 1980s some moth-eaten parts were repaired through a Benedictine nun who happened to work in the Institute of Book and Manuscript Conservation of the Bavarian State Library in Munich, which resulted in its current binding in indigo silk. Despite the persistent interest of art auctioneers such as Christie's and Sotheby's in the paintings, the friendship between Archabbot Jeremias Schröder and Father Seon Jihun at the two monasteries contributed to its repatriation to Korea in the end.
This story around Jeong Seon's album cannot be framed in the simple dichotomy between, on the one hand, the European missionary or coloniser appropriating and orientalising Asian culture, and on the other, the colonised and victimised people who claim the right over lost cultural treasures. It underlines history not as a monolithic entity but which individuals act upon from different standpoints. The life of the album so far speaks volumes about cross-cultural history, and there will be a lot more in its life from now on.
* KBS documentary on the repatriation of Jeong Seon's album
* Cosmos in brushstrokes: the life and painting of Jeong Seon (National Museum of Korea, Seoul, 8 September - 22 November 2009)
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