20th Century Korean Art, and: Modern Korean Ink Painting (review)

1 18The Journal ofKorean Studies "Buddhism as it was practiced on the ground level." On the other hand, readers should also be aware that, in its emphasis on cult andritual, McBride's approach— despite a certain reluctance to use the term "scholar-monks" (p. 1)—remains to some extent confined by widespread assumptions about the scholastic nature of exegetical literature. As authors such as T'ang Yungt'ung or Yu Shiyi have shown, exegesis was usually performed in a highly ritualized context. Also, in the Hwaöm tradition, reading and writing even provided a core element ofspiritual practice. Notwithstanding these somewhat partisan objections, Domesticating the Dharma provides a most learned synthesis of Korean scholarship into a comprehensive outlook on Silla Buddhism. This work should become a standard monograph for any introductory course on Silla Buddhism. NOTE 1. Ki-yong Rhi, [Yi Kiyöng], "Brief Remarks on the Buddha-land Ideology in Silla during the Seventh and Eighth Centuries" in Tang China and Beyond: Studies on East Asiafrom the Seventh to the Tenth Century, ed. Antonino Forte (Kyoto: Instituto Italiano di Cultura Scuola di Studa sull'Asia Orientale [Italian School of East Asian Studies], 1988), 163-179. Reviewed by Jörg Plassen University of Hamburg 20th Century Korean Art by Youngna Kim. Translated by Youngna Kim and Doryun Chong. London: Laurence King Publishing Ltd., 2006. 283 pp. 213 figures. $40.00 (paper) Modern Korean Ink Painting by Chung Hyung-Min. Edited by Raymond W. Furse. Korean Culture Series 5. Seoul and Elizabeth , NJ: Hollym, 2006. 158 pp. 102 plates, 35 figures. $34.50 (cloth), $29.95 (paper) Art history is a relatively new academic field in Korea. It was not until the early 1990s that we saw the first doctoral program for art history offered by a South Korean university. The two books under review are the first scholarly works in English that treat the arts of the entire modern period as a history. Although Youngna Kim (Kim Yöngna) presents a history of all art genres, the volume's emphasis is clearly on painting, while the work by Chung HyungMin (Chöng Hyöngmin) deals specifically with the modernization of twentieth -century brush-and-ink painting. Thus far, books on modern Korean art, with only few exceptions, have been written by Korean art critics and Book Reviews119 journalists, and typically consist of texts that previously had been published in magazines. Chung Hyung-Min's short volume, Modern Korean Ink Painting, is an exception in both respects; the author is a trained academic in Asian art history, and her text was composed explicitly for this book. Not so with the twelve chapters in 20th Century Korean Art by Youngna Kim, who is now an art history professor at Seoul National University. All but one of Kim's chapters had already been published as articles in some of the new academic journals on modern and contemporary art that started to appear in the 1990s. Kim herself serves as president of the association that was formed to publish one ofthese newjournals: Han'gukkünhyöndae misulsahak (Journal ofModern & Contemporary Korean Art History). Youngna Kim's original work in Korean was translated as one of the "100 Books from Korea" for the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2005. The resulting English edition, 20th Century Korean Art (which did not quite make it in time for Frankfurt, as it was published in April 2006), is, in sum, a better work than the 1998 Korean version. The author has added four new chapters to the book's first part—which covers the period from the end of the nineteenth century to 1945—and deleted a weak chapter on a thankless subject, modern Korean nude painting. To part 2, which covers the period from liberation to the late 1990s, she added only one chapter, an astonishingly briefdiscussion oftwo major styles and movements: 1970s monochrome art and 1980s minjung art (pp. 252-65). Kim also dropped a short essay on modernism and postmodernism with a focus on Europe and the Unites States, and a chapter on how East Asian calligraphy influenced post-World War II abstract expressionism in the West. Finally, and thankfully, the author and her British publisher...