Kang Se-hwnag(1713-1719)was an archetypical literati of 18th century who excelled in the three arts of poetry, calligraphy, and painting. Kang also achieved great acclaim as a painting theorist and connoisseur through his extensive study of the ol...
Kang Se-hwnag(1713-1719)was an archetypical literati of 18th century who excelled in the three arts of poetry, calligraphy, and painting. Kang also achieved great acclaim as a painting theorist and connoisseur through his extensive study of the old masters. He attracted many admirers and was at the center of the leading artistic circles of his day.
This dissertation seeks to illuminate the life and art of Kang Se-hwang through an analysis of his extant paintings and writings. Other primary and secondary sources pertinent to Kang’s life and art were also examined.
A look at Kang Se-hwang’s writings reveals and outgoing gentleman of keen intellect who cultivated a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, actively promoted, and practiced the arts, and boldly formulated art theory and criticism. He descended from a yangban family in Seoul whose members had distinguished themselves for three generation as a noble family(三世耆英之家). His early and middle years were devoted to gentlemanly self-cultivation in the Confucian mode and he didn’t assume a government position until he was 61 years old. He served Kings Yongjo(英祖)and Chungjo(正祖)and traveled do China as an official envoy at the age of 72.
A look at the extant painting of Kang Se-hwang reveals a versatile artist who pursued the Confucian gentleman’s ideal literati or Southern School painting style based on Chinese prototypes developed by Tung Yuan(董源), the Four Masters of the Yuan(元末四大家), the Wu School of the Ming(明代吳派), Tung Ch’I-ch’ang(董其昌), and the Mi School(米法).
Although Kang embraced the tenets of the more orthodox literati school, he was not a slave to them. He was able to appreciate the achievements of professional or non-literati painters and he did not shun from painting such non-literati subject matter as figures and portraits, genre scenes, and depictions of actual views from nature. He even experimented with landscapes and portraits painted smoewhat in a Western style.
Since Kang Se-hwang had a long and productive painting career, it is possible to classify his oeuvre into three chronological periods: an early period(up to the age of 45), a middle period(ages 45-51), and a late period(ages 51-79). The early period was one of basic training and research. During these years, Kang mastered the various styles of the Southern School by studying Chinese painting manuals. He synthesized what he learned into a personal style and begun to formulated his theories on painting landscapes and views from nature.
The middle period witnessed the full flowering of Kang’s art. He experimented with Western painting, pioneered some innovative brush techniques, and achieved complete mastery of brush, color, and ink. In the late period, Kang turned more inward. The range of subject matter in his late works narrowed as he focused more and more on painting actual landscapes and solo subjects such as orchids, rocks, and especially bamboo(墨竹). The tendency toward reduction and simplication is also evident in the elimination of color from his late paintings. Toward the end, Kang had reached that lofty stage of the scholar-painter where the colors of the world could be evoked solely through the sonorous manipulation of ink tones.
As a representative scholar-painter of the late Choson period, Kang Se-hwang played a major role in the complete Koreanization of the Southern School of Chinese painting. His synthesis of the Chinese models and his development of a distinct Korean style based on those models as well as his pioneering efforts to incorporate Western elements into Korean painting made him one of the great masters of Korean painting.