Chairman
"Our ancestors painted drawings skillfully. Among the drawings by the painters of the olden times, there are many masterpieces."
Kim Jun Gun was an artist who conducted creative activities in the latter half of the 19th century when modernization was being promoted in Korea. He was not in government service.
His pen name was Kisan and no detailed information is known about the period of his existence, family background and so on.
The Album of Figure Paintings of Kisan containing 179 pieces can be claimed to be an encyclopedic work encompassing every sphere of social life in Korea in the latter half of the 19th century as he accurately portrayed the economic life, sports and amusement activities and the custom of ceremonies of coming of age, marriage, funeral and ancestral worship of the contemporary people and even the system of all kinds of criminal laws showing the reactionary ruling methods in feudal society.
Seventy-five out of the 179 pieces represent the people's labour life. And pictures on the theme of agricultural production activities take a large share.
Among them, there are 24 pieces that depict rice farming such titles as "Rice transplanting", "Drawing water into rice paddy", "Shoveling", "Sowing", "Weeding in paddy", "Rice harvest", "Rice threshing", "Rice threshing at the log" and "Tillage" and dry-field farming like "Plowing" and it takes 30%.
His paintings on such theme vividly reflect all the rice farming processes the contemporary peasants carried out according to season.
"Rice transplanting", "Drawing water into rice paddy", "Shovelling", "Sowing", "Weeding in paddy", "Rice harvest", "Rice threshing" and "Rice threshing at the log" are pictures giving a vivid portrayal of all those processes in a comprehensive way.
The peasants depicted in "Rice transplanting" tally with the record on the rice transplanting method carried in Kwanongsocho, a book on agro-technology written by Pak Ji Won, a Korean realist scholar in the latter half of the 18th century. It reads: "Pick up rice seedlings carefully, clean their roots with water to remove soil and pick out barnyard grass, bind them in small numbers and throw the bunches of them in the harrowed paddies, before planting them by threes or fours in an upright position and straight rows. Then it will be convenient to weed the field later."
As seen in "Rice transplanting", the two men, who seem to be father and son, are planting rice seedlings on the paddy in straight lines. They plant the seedlings in an upright position and straight rows in order to do weeding conveniently later and their working practice shows that they do farming by employing a method capable of producing a high yield.
The painter could exquisitely paint pictures focusing on rice farming, because he would frequently see peasants doing farming in a more advanced method than previously as he stayed in the lowlands where rice farming was being done on a large scale.
The paintings representing rice farming also reflect production activities of peasants who fertilize paddy fields and thresh rice by using various farming tools.
"Shovelling" depicts a shoveller and two rope men levelling a paddy field together with one of the blades of the shovel and "Harrowing of rice paddy" vividly shows the process of laying out a paddy by peasants including the one driving an ox put to a harrow while flicking a whip. In "Sowing", three peasants sow seeds in seedbeds using various farming implements and in "Rice harvest" and "Rice threshing at the log" two peasants harvest a rice field and swing hard rice sheaves to a log threshing-stand.
Like this, the figure painting album contains pictures vividly portraying all the rice farming processes.
The paintings on the theme of agricultural production in the album also represent peasants doing dry-field farming by using various farming tools.
A typical example is "Tillage". The picture truthfully represents a peasant tilling a dry field with a cultivator. Tillage is a process of turning the soil between ridges. It improves the physical properties of soil: it enhances the air permeability of soil, raises its temperature, gets rid of the weeds which appear along with the growth of crops and earths up crops. The process has long been carried out by the Koreans. Originally, earth surface was scraped to remove weeds and later the methods of preventing the hardening of soil and clearing weeds were developed and evolved into the scientific farming process of tillage. Historical data shows that there were dozens of kinds of cultivators applied according to regional soil conditions and crops and the most widely used one was a plough-type one.
Kim Jun Gun's "Tillage" shows a diligent and industrious peasant who digs earth from a furrow up to a ridge using the plough put to an ox. This farming method was mainly used when water did not drain well due to much rain in summer and the painting tells that the method was widely used by peasants at the time.
The figure paintings in Kim Jun Gun's album which show such agricultural activities as rice and dry-field farming have a series of special characteristics which cannot be seen in the pictures of the preceding periods.
Above all, various agricultural production activities of working people are depicted in a more detailed and concrete way than the preceding periods.
What is noticeable in such pictures by Kim Jun Gun is that the farming process of each season was represented in a comprehensive way unlike such pictures by Ri Han Chol and Kim Tu Ryang, preceding Korean artists, as "Picture of peasants' life" and "Four seasons" portraying all farming processes in one picture.
Kim Jun Gun set each agricultural production process as an independent theme according to the aim of creation with an eye to extending the range of themes and subdividing them and thus showing the farming processes in a detailed way. For example, as seen in the pictures relating to rice farming, each farming process ranging from transplanting to threshing was chosen as an independent theme and portrayed in detail according to the relevant objects.
Kim Hong Do and Kim Tuk Sin, artists of Tohwaso (a government agency in charge of painting during the feudal Joson dynasty) in the period between the late 18th century and the mid-19th century produced only "Threshing" on the same theme each, but failed to create other pictures showing agricultural activities of people in a diverse way. However, Kim Jun Gun produced paintings showing agricultural production in a detailed way. He portrayed rice and dry-field farming activities of people, including transplanting, sowing, harvest and tillage.
This proves that the pictures in his figure album show agricultural activities in a more detailed and concrete way than the paintings of the preceding periods.
And he also gave a true-to-life and natural portrayal of interrelationships between figures in his works as compared to the preceding periods. The pictures in his album depicting agricultural production activities are characterized by more appropriate setting of human relationship than the preceding periods.
In "Weeding in paddy", for instance, two peasants diligently weeding a paddy field are positioned at the front part and another peasant, seemingly their father who is standing and looking back at his working children while smoking with a hoe in his hand, at the back, thereby giving a natural portrayal of rice paddy weeding by a farming family. It can be seen that in the picture, the artist set the human relationship in a comparatively plain and truthful way. In addition, such simple composition and lifelike portrayal of figures in his pictures can scarcely be found in the pictures of the preceding periods.
This is evidenced by "Shovelling". The picture is composed in a simple way and the depiction of peasants taking a shovel and ropes enables the viewer to recognize their working process at a glance.
As seen above, the pictures in Kim Jun Gun's figure album show the diligent farming practice of the Korean people in the latter half of the 19th century in a vivid and realistic way, and they are of significance in understanding the agricultural production activities in those days.
