Paintings from the late Joseon era are on public display at the POSCO Art Museum, offering a chance for students to see in person some of the major paintings and calligraphy works often shown in school textbooks.

As the exhibition title “From Gyeonmjae to Hyewon, Gathering of Joseon’s Genius Painters” indicates, the exhibition shows landscape paintings drawn by great painters of the era. The painters range from Jeong Seon (known by his pen name Gyeomjae) to Shin Yoon-bok (Hyewon), considered geniuses today.

The exhibition also has on display calligraphy works by famous writers such as Han Ho, better known as Han Seok-bong, Kim Jeong-hee and Jeong Yak-yong from the cultural golden age of Joseon. 

Jeong Seon’s Jingyeong landscape paintings feature realistic depictions of the Korean landscape. Jeong was a pioneer of a Korean style of portraying the country’s landscape more realistically and beautifully, especially when Korean art was strongly influenced by Chinese art.

Paintings by Shim Sa-jeong, a student of Jeong, on the other hand, are considered representative of imaginary landscape paintings, which were drawn based on an artist’s memory and imagination of certain landscape scenes.

Genre painter Kim Hong-do’s landscape paintings show perspective being expressed using light and shade for the first time. Kim is often praised for having taken painting techniques of Korean art to the next level.

The exhibition offers a diverse spectrum of landscape paintings from Shin Yoon-bok’s rare landscape paintings to different styles of Geumgangsan paintings by several artists.

Shin, famous for his genre paintings depicting the lives or ordinary people, also painted some landscapes, including one featuring a bird in the woods.

The exhibition continues through Sept. 25 at POSCO Art Museum in the POSCO Center, Daechi-dong, Seoul.

For more information, visit www.poscoartmuseum.org.

By Lee Woo-young  (wylee@heraldcorp.com)