Pathways to Korean Culture: Paintings of the Joseon Period (1392–1910) by Burglind Jungmann (review)

Paintings of the Joseon period are arguably the most popular subjects of study in Korean art history. However, despite the vast amount of research that has amassed over the years, most general introductions to the period’s paintings merely narrate the changes in their artistic forms and styles over time, rarely offering us a fresh perspective on the paintings in general. Burglind Jungmann intends to remedy this situation in her new book, and it will attract attention from scholars and students alike. Reflecting the latest research in the field, Jungmann’s Pathways to Korean Culture is a vast and accessible academic work that covers the whole Joseon era in broad strokes.

Pathways to Korean Culture’s significance lies in the fact that it is the first work of art history published outside of Korea on the general course of Joseon period painting. Beginning with the study of Joseon period landscape painting, the book branches out to cover the subjects of court art and folk painting. This wide range shows Jungmann’s variety of interests, as well as her labor to maintain a balanced view on the age’s zeitgeist. Critically approaching the latest research on the paintings, Jungmann deftly situates her position and crafts a field of competing interpretations on each individual artwork for the reader to consider. The Index of Characters and the Index of Painters included at the end of the book list both Romanized forms and Chinese characters, and will prove invaluable to scholars conducting their own studies. However, despite the author’s expressed intent to narrate Joseon art history from an original perspective, the plates of artworks reproduced in the book vary little from the works usually considered to be the canon in other introductory textbooks. The author also divides the book into two parts by covering the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries in part 1 and the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries in part 2. What is somewhat disappointing here is that this chronological division does not differ from other Korean art historians’ tendency to use the eighteenth century as the point of demarcation in Joseon art history.

The book does not cover the entire timeline of the Joseon dynasty in minute detail. Focusing instead on her areas of interest, Jungmann summarily writes on major artworks from key periods. The book’s first part, titled “The Early Joseon Dynasty: Neo-Confucian Ideals and Strategies of Reclusion,” faithfully draws from Jungmann’s previous studies and research. What is special about part 1 is found in its third chapter, where Jungmann writes on “Women as Artists and Patrons” as a separate, independent subject. Here, Jungmann treats figures from the sixteenth century such as Sin Saimdang, the famous woman artist, and Queen Regent Munjeong, the patron of Buddhist art. This chapter proves to be significant because it contextualizes sixteenth-century Joseon art through the period’s society and culture, rather than just dealing with the artistic style of the time. In Chapter Four, “Strategies of Reclusion,” Jungmann writes on intellectual painters and bases her interpretations on textual evidence. However, when writing on Kim Si, the major intellectual painter of the period, Jungmann oddly concentrates on the bad reputation of Kim Si’s father Kim Allo, a powerful official during the reign of King Jungjong. Jungmann also mentions Choe Rip, who wrote the poem on Yi Gyeongyun’s painting Album of Figures and Landscapes (Sansu inmul hwacheop), and states several times over that Choe was jungin, a class of artisans and skilled professionals that stood between yangban nobles and peasants in the social hierarchy. These social and cultural facts about the artists are brought up, but are not discussed thoroughly enough to show how they are connected to the formulations of Kim Si’s art or Choe Rip’s art philosophy.

In part 2, titled “Native Themes Versus Foreign Style,” Jungmann examines Joseon artists’ adaptation of China’s Southern School style of painting. Jungmann also looks at art...