Contemporary Art in Early Colonial Korea: The Self Portraits of Ko Hui-dong

© Association of Art Historians 2013 393

Contemporary Art in Early Colonial Korea:The Self Portraits of Ko Hui-dongJoan Kee

Many discussions of modern art in Korea, and indeed elsewhere in Asia, have

often turned on the discernment of cultural difference or technical innovation as

perhaps exemplifi ed by the alleged distinctions between so-called ‘Western-style’

and ‘Oriental’ painting. Yet the works most frequently championed as a result

often tell a strikingly different story, a key case in point being the self-portraits

of Ko Hui-dong (1886-1965). Widely recognized in Korea as the fi rst examples

of Western-style oil painting by a Korean artist, these self-portraits impart an

understanding of medium that extends well beyond the affi rmation of stylistic and

cultural difference.1 Instead, the works–of which only three remain today–refl ect

a protracted engagement with the materials and spatial possibilities characteristic

of ‘Western’ and ‘Oriental’ painting as a means of negotiating the complexities of

the years just before and after Japan’s colonization of Korea in 1910. To Ko, a former

court bureaucrat-turned-professional painter, this time seemed overly determined by

the imperialist imperatives of a certain model of modernity predicated on teleology

and the attendant destabilisation of long-standing forms of social order. As denoted

by his works Self Portrait in Overcoat, Self Portrait with Hat, and Self Portrait with Fan, the main

challenge according to Ko lay in asking what it meant to be present, especially when

the condition of being such was embedded within competing models of temporal

order that overlapped and collided with one another. What did it mean to enact

depiction that made sense for this time–what, in short, did ‘contemporary art’ mean

at this time?

Medium as Measure: Oil Painting in Late Choson KoreaThe exemplifi cation of Ko’s works denote the extent to which the modernity of

non-Euroamerican art is often calibrated to the introduction of Western modes of

depiction, namely, oil painting. Redza Piyadasa, the Malaysian artist and art historian,

implies as much in his informative account of the history of modern art in Malaysia

and Singapore: oil painting is clearly identifi ed as part of ‘Western-type secularist

art’ with which conceptions of the ‘modern’ have been associated.2 In many cases,

the dissemination of oil painting is construed diachronically, as a symptomatic

encounter between two discrete agents at a particular moment in time.

Yet by the early twentieth century, the decision to paint using oil and canvas

in Korea meant engaging with at least two different streams of reception. One

was intimately bonded with a renewed sense of enlightenment (kaehwa) based on

technologies and ideas from the purported ‘West’ (yang) expressed through sweeping

Detail from Ko Hui-dong, Self Portrait with Hat, 1915 (plate 8).

DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8365.2012.00950.xArt History | ISSN 0141-679036 | 2 | April 2013 | pages 392-417


Contemporary Art in Early Colonial Korea

changes in behaviour in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The other

concerned an intensely diachronic trajectory of painting in Korea, one that already

borrowed freely from Western-style oil painting. Hong Son-p’yo, arguably the most

prolifi c commentator on the history of oil painting techniques in Korean art, points

out that methods associated with Western-style oil painting, namely, perspective and

shading, were duly incorporated in newspaper illustrations from the 1890s.3 During

the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars, Japanese war painters en route to the

front were alleged to have produced oil paintings during brief sojourns in Korea.4 In

1899, Hubert Vos, a Dutch painter, created a portrait of Kojong, the second-to-last

king of the Choson dynasty (1392-1910), now present-day Korea (plate 1). Allegedly

the fi rst Western-style oil painting created in Korea, the portrait was intended as part

of a larger group of portraits of Asians. The establishment of the Choson kingdom

as a Japanese protectorate in 1905 and an outright colony in 1910 meant an infl ux of

Japanese expatriates whose number included several oil painters. Advertisements

hawking materials for Western-style oil painting regularly appeared in general

publications in 1910, while Yamamoto Baigai, whose former pupils in China

included Lingnan School stalwart Gao Jianfu, established Korea’s fi rst academy of oil

painting in 1911 in Uljiro 5-ga in what was then downtown Seoul.5

Ko may have been exposed to oil paintings through family and friends, most

of whom were of chungin origin. Literally meaning ‘middle people,’ the chungin, according to the social hierarchy of Choson Korea, ranked below the yangban, the elite class composed of landed gentry and scholar-offi cials, but above the

commoners. The chungin were proto-professionals of a kind, specializing in such

areas as law, medicine, and accounting. The chungin also comprised the majority of

court painters (hwawon), even if they did not command the same measure of respect

as their peers working in other areas, such as medicine, accounting, or law, partly

because they worked with their hands to produce goods for consumption.6 The

family to which Ko Hui-dong belonged, the Cheju Kos, were among Korea’s most

powerful and prominent chungin families, having long served the government as

offi cial interpreters and translators (yokkwan), traditionally the most respected of the

occupations associated with the chungin class whose importance grew exponentially

in the late nineteenth century as the Korean court attempted to preserve its

autonomy by negotiating with various foreign powers.7 It is likely that Ko’s fi rst

encounter with oil painting may have taken place through his father, Ko Yong-ch’ol,

a court interpreter who travelled widely, including to China and the US, and who

was himself artistically inclined. Another possible catalyst was Oh Se-ch’ang, the

well-known offi cial, intellectual, journalist, connoisseur, and calligrapher of chungin

origin with whom Ko became acquainted as a teenager in the spring of 1901.8 Like

Ko, Oh, whose father was Oh Kyong-sok, a leader of what in the 1870s and 1880s

was a collaborative effort to mobilize foreign technology and knowledge in response

to a changing world order, was from a well-established family of translators

and interpreters whose frequent travels brought them into contact with foreign

knowledge, techniques, and objects.

Certainly Ko’s class background would have facilitated his reception of oil

painting. Chungin interpreters employed in the royal court were among the fi rst to

embrace Western modes of knowledge. Ko himself dates his fi rst encounter with

oil painting from his interactions with Westerners around the time of the Russo-

Japanese War (1904-1905), even ‘going to their homes, where I had the opportunity

of acquiring many good paintings.’9 He may have been speaking of Vos, whose

portraits he recognized as the fi rst examples of Western-style oil painting, even


Joan Kee

though the portrait of Kojong which hung in Toksu

Palace perished due to fi re in 1904 and there is no

evidence to confi rm that he actually saw them at

the time they were made.10 Ko’s point of reference

was more likely Léopold Remion, whom he met

while preparing to join the family profession at the

Hansong French Academy, a school established by the

royal court which Ko attended from 1899 to 1903. A

potter from Sèvres, Remion initially came to Korea

at the behest of the royal court in 1902 in order to

establish a porcelain works and later a school of arts

and crafts.11 Ko met Remion through his French

teacher Emile Martel, whose image Remion sketched

in charcoal.12 Presumably excited by what he saw, the

young Ko is said to have participated in an exhibition

of oil paintings held in a room rented from the French

legation in central Seoul in 1905 and open to the

public.13

Ko’s reception of Western-style oil painting also

descended from a longer genealogy. References to

Western-style oil painting can be traced as far back as

the 16th century; one account cites the mid-Choson

dynasty scholar Ch’oe Yip as having encountered

such painting at the home of his contemporary,

Wang Shizhen, the Ming poet and scholar from

Suzhou renowned for his patronage of the arts.14 Most

encounters took place, however, beginning in the

eighteenth century as tensions between the Choson

kingdom and the Qing empire relaxed. Envoys to

China returned to Korea with a plethora of materials

regarding Western techniques of looking. The late

Choson philosopher Yi Ik (1681-1763) wrote, for

example, of envoys newly returned from what is now

present-day Beijing ‘who bought Western-style oil

paintings and hung them in their main hallways.’15

Much of this reception coincided with the spread of

silhak, a school of philosophy that stressed practical

learning and social reform whose key proponents

included Yi Ik and others for whom Western-style oil

painting offered another tool through which to more

objectively assess the world. Paintings that drew from Western-style oil painting

were less noticeable after the suppression of silhak in the early nineteenth century.

Yet by the end of the 1800s, artists were again openly referring to oil painting, often

as a result of mediating what they saw of both ink and oil painting overseas. Despite

Japan’s increasing political infl uence in Korea, much of this mediation revolved

around Korean artists’ travels to China. In the 1890s, for example, the court painter

An Chung-sik travelled to Shanghai, the intensely cosmopolitan city which since

the mid-19th century had attracted a sizable class of professional painters eager to

incorporate all that was new into their works.16

1 Hubert Vos, Gojong, King of Korea, 1899. Oil on canvas, 199 x 92 cm. Private Collection. Photo: Courtesy of the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea.



The Place of Ink PaintingIf Ko, who received his initial artistic instruction

from An, later denied feeling any ‘particularly strong

attachment to Western-style oil painting’ at the

time, it may have had to do with the extent to which

techniques of oil painting were already embedded

within the Korean pictorial tradition.17 It also

concerned a lack of distinction between ‘Western-

style’ and ‘Oriental’, or ‘Eastern-style’, painting in

Korea, an absence Ko claimed was present when he

fi rst sought instruction from An Chung-sik.18 In A Spring Morning on Paeggak Mountain, the image vacillates between

illusionistic recession into space and allegiance

to the uniformity of the picture plane (plate 2). Kwanghwamun, the main gate of Kyongbok Palace,

the primary seat of the Choson kings located in central

Seoul, is set back far enough so as to convey a sensation

of depth. A modest brace of trees and a stone guardian,

a haet’ae, on the right-hand side of the immediate

foreground act as leading images, guiding the eye into

the painting’s internal world. Yet An just as quickly

compromises this effect by depicting the buildings and

grounds of the palace as a set of occlusions. Trees and

other foliage veil much of the buildings, leaving visible

only the rooftops which lie fl at on the surface of the

picture, without any real sense of three-dimensional

volume. Architecture, it seems, is but a foil for the

towering mountains above. Densely clustered so as

to appear like one interrelated mass, the mountains

positioned to the left protrude from the surface of

painting. Suspended between two competing notions

of space, the work stands outside the trajectories of

both literati and court painting. An is reconsidering

what it means to paint in ink.

His student engaged in similar concerns as seen

in what is his earliest known work, an ink-and-colour

work on paper from 1907 (plate 3). In the larger context

of ink painting, the subject is fairly standard, showing

Mi Fu, the Song Dynasty painter and calligrapher,

bowing to a rock on a riverbank. The proportions of

the painting are peculiar; at 32 by 67.6 centimetres it

neither corresponds to the dimensions of a hanging

scroll, an album leaf, or a handscroll. In the upper-left

hand corner, a colophon reads: ‘I painted this work

soon after I began to learn from Simjon [An Chung-sik]

by copying his.’ Mi Fu pays obeisance to a rock, an act

of deference emphasized by the resemblance between the stone and the scholar’s

robe, which in Ko’s hands looks less like soft fabric and more like an accumulation

of hard stone edges. The bow is the primary event, yet Ko places it well off centre

so that the central point of focus is the point at which the near riverbank appears to

2 An Chung-sik, A Spring Morning on Paeggak Mountain, 1915. Ink and colour on silk, 125.9 x 51.5 cm. Seoul: National Museum of Korea.


Joan Kee

converge with its far counterpart just right of the tree that divides pictorial space in

half. The apparent moment of convergence takes its cue from linear perspective; that

Ko centres his painting on this moment denotes an intention to make his receptivity

to vanishing-point perspective a central subject of his work. On the far right is a

group of hills that appear to recede into the far distance, an impression supported by

the tonal gradations used to emphasize the contours of the far riverbank.

Ko may have left the Hansong French Academy ready to enter the family career of

language translation. Yet it is as a painter that Ko most vigorously fl exed his powers

of negotiation between one visual language and another. Negotiation did not ensure

equilibrium between the two sides. Consider Self Portrait in Overcoat, a work whose

exact date is unknown but was almost certainly painted while Ko was a student at

the Tokyo School of Fine Arts from 1909 to 1915 (plate 4). Since its founding in 1887,

the Tokyo School of Fine Arts had long served as the backdrop for one of the most

defi ning characteristics of modern art in Japan, the competition between those

practicing yoga, or Western painting, and those vested in nihonga, or works using

traditional materials and according to traditional Japanese conventions. Ko enrolled

in the school with the assistance of Komiya Mihomatsu, a family friend and the

Japanese vice-minister of the Korean imperial household ministry responsible for

proposing the erection of Korea’s fi rst museum in 1907.19

The exact date of Self Portrait in Overcoat has been a matter of some contention. It was

unsigned, and there are no records indicating its exhibition history or even whether

the work had been publicly shown at all.20 The critic and journalist Yi Ku-yol, who

has perhaps written more extensively on Ko’s work than any other, states that the

work was made at the end of 1914.21 Oh Kwang-su, another prolifi c commentator,

contends that the work was made prior to 1915 on account of its execution, which he

considers as inferior to the other two known portraits.22 Art historian Yun Pom-mo

concurs with Oh’s opinion, pointing out that the face is more youthful, although

he shies away from giving an exact year.23 Oh’s point concerning the quality of the

portrait’s execution seems valid in that Ko tried very hard to follow the technical

strictures of his Japanese instructors. Self Portrait in Overcoat has a workmanlike air, as

if Ko was trying his best to demonstrate the extent to which he had digested the

lessons of his teachers like Nagahara Kotaro, whose own self-portrait of 1900 is a

diligent study in shading (plate 5). Ko decisively outlines his own jaw line in a light

greyish-blue, while depicting his overcoat as an interplay between lighter and darker

brushstrokes. Conservation reports, moreover, show that in painting the head, Ko

3 Ko Hui-dong, Mi Fu Bowing to a Rock, 1907. Ink and colour on paper, 32 x 67.6 cm. Private Collection. Photo: Courtesy of Seoul National University Museum.



applied many layers of thick oil paint.24 So thickly painted, in fact, was the face and

hair that they would have appeared to protrude from the surface of the support. Ko

seems to have revelled in the capacity of oil painting to mimic any number of tactile

surfaces, from velvety locks to skin so smooth and solid as if carved from marble.

The artist displays a fascination with the viscosity and sheen of oil paint that borders

on the zealous, a double effect of initially distinguishing oil painting through the

material properties of pigment and binder, and of having to work in an art world

whose social confi guration turned on communities based on the practice of a

particular medium.25

Yet in Self Portrait in Overcoat Ko clings to the tenets of ink painting in a way that

presupposes a reluctance to fully invest himself in this medium so thoroughly

defi ned by its claims to newness. The artist, for example, insists on maintaining

4 Ko Hui-dong, Self Portrait in Overcoat, 1909. Oil on canvas, 45.8 x 33.5 cm. Gwacheon: National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea.


Joan Kee

his allegiance to pictorial surface as the site upon

which the viewing encounter takes place. Contrary

to oil painters, Ko insists on maintaining spatial

fl atness that preserves the integrity of the material

surface. This might initially be read through what Ko

himself regarded as a lack of knowledge regarding

the fi ner points of shading.26 The gradation of the jaw

line comes across as laboured, while the alternating

sequence of light and dark brushstrokes reads more

convincingly as a pattern than as a bona fi de effort

at portraying three-dimensionality. That the artist

dates this lack to his earliest days in Tokyo suggests

that Self Portrait in Overcoat was painted not long after he

fi rst arrived in 1909, possibly shortly after he passed

the examinations to gain formal admission into the

Western painting department of the Tokyo School of

Fine Arts in late June of that year.

Technical defi ciency, however, cannot satisfactorily

account for the strong presumption of intentionality

underpinning Ko’s treatment of pictorial space, which

resembles a series of interlocking areas of fl at colour.

The artist’s face and bust are presumably set against a

reddish-brown background, but both are suffi ciently

fl attened as to seem part of the background itself. Ko

persists on rendering all features in terms of fl attened

lines; the eyebrows and small moustache are a series of brief, thick lines, while the

collar of his overcoat is similarly fringed with a thin orange line. Even the shading

is undertaken in a way that only reinforces the linearity of his collar. Evident here is

an apparent return to a type of line that pushes back against oil painting, or at least

connotes scepticism towards its primary strategies.

Illumination and Imminence in Taisho Self PortraitureThroughout the portrait is a pervasive sense of line that runs directly counter to the

pronounced emphasis on illusionistic space then being taught at the Tokyo School

of Fine Arts. Absent too is the kind of illumination heavily prioritized at the school.

Recalling his fi rst two months of study in Tokyo, Ko remembered an early incident

in which one of his teachers explained that even if two sides of an object were both

brightly lit, the point at which they converged would appear as a single dark line.27

Ko then added: ‘From that point on, I trained my eyes to immediately look for the

refraction of light, the depiction of shading and how an object might change shape

in whatever I saw.’28 The emphasis on handling light made an impression on Ko’s

students, including Yi Sung-man, who recounted an anecdote in which one of Ko’s

Japanese teachers pointed to a plaster-of-Paris bust of the kind ordinarily used to

teach drawing, and asked Ko what colour it was.29 The new student responded, ‘it is,

of course, white.’ The teacher then pointed to an unlit side of the plaster bust, asking

Ko whether the bust still looked white, to which Ko supposedly recognized the error

of his thinking.

Extreme shading was particularly emphasized in self-portraiture, a genre

whose proliferation during Ko’s years in Tokyo may itself be regarded as an index of

transition. As has been widely contended, the Taisho period (1912-1926) revolved

5 Nagahara Kotaro, Self Portrait, 1900. Oil on canvas, 45.5 x 33.5 cm. Mie: Mie Prefectural Art Museum.



around the concept of a self left unrealized during the

frenetic empire-building years of the Meiji era (1868-

1912) where the individual was obligated to devote

his or her energies to the making of a modern state.30

Explorations of the self intensifi ed after the Russo-

Japanese War when the Japanese were compelled to

agree to a peace treaty whose terms were widely seen

as unfair. These explorations intensifi ed in the Taisho

period, as several artists produced works that appeared

to harbour agendas counter to those of a state whose

main functionaries and institutions appeared bent on

reifying particular styles at the expense of personal

expression. As a medium that proposes ‘the artist as

the ultimate subject of art’, self-portraiture enjoyed a

special pre-eminence.31

Artists like Kishida Ryusei actively repurposed

Meiji-era attempts to formulate a national style for their

own ends. A former student of Kuroda Seiki, the doyen

of Western-style oil painting in Japan, this self-portrait

of May 1914 demands the viewer’s immediate attention

on account of its dramatic, even theatrical, manipulation

of light (plate 6). The face is lit from the side, so that

we understand it fi rst as a volumetric solid rather than a planar surface. Considered

shocking when Kuroda returned to Tokyo from Paris in 1893, the manipulation of

light had since become routine for Kuroda’s students at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts.

An elaborately shaded image was simply evidence that a student had mastered one of

the most important skills that would permit him or her to then teach those skills to

others; a teaching credential was the objective of most students enrolled at the school.

In Kishida’s self-portrait, the treatment of light is turned towards another goal,

the compromise of certainty. Resting heavily on the artist’s shoulders, the head

appears as if moulded out of clay. The chin, lips, nose, and particularly the artist’s

right ear approach monumentality in their presumed function as anchors on which

the rest of pictorial space hangs. Yet the face is destabilized by the juxtaposition

of bright illumination and dense shadow. The encounter between the two sides

dissolves the central portion of the face into a constellation of furrows and puckers

that verge on the point of implosion. Despite the initial apprehension of the self as a

solid edifi ce, Kishida’s use of illumination explicitly invokes the power of imminence

and its capacity to remould even the hardest of materials.

It is worth noting that Kishida’s hero was Albrecht Dürer, whose own approach

to self portraiture birthed a genealogy to which the self portraits of the Taisho

belonged.32 The former takes his cue especially from the latter’s celebrated self-

portrait of 1500 which proposes that the image of the self must necessarily be secured

by its identifi cation. The fi ne brushwork with which he formed the numbers ‘1500’

on the left and the inscription declaring his authorship on the right so resembles

the effect produced by the incision of a sharp burin into a hard surface as to convey

permanence, or an imperviousness to change. It is as much a claim to history as it is

an affi rmation of what Joseph Koerner has described as ‘the epochal change that his

self-portraits are believed, in retrospect, to instantiate’.33

Kishida was no less anxious in his desire to identify himself in terms of a

particular moment, in this case, the date May, 9, 1914. Painted in a dark brown that

6 Kishida Ryusei, Self Portrait, 1914. Oil on canvas, 44 x 36.8 cm. Tokyo: National Museum of Modern Art.


Joan Kee

registers with some diffi culty against the painting’s muddy umber background,

Kishida’s cursive script appears far less decisive than Dürer’s ‘incised’ letters save

for the emphatic punctuation marks following each word. Unlike his predecessor,

Kishida cannot commit to a time for his own sense of time was fundamentally

undermined by an ingrained awareness of ephemerality as the primary condition

of existence. His portrait resonated productively with the abundance of literature

revolving around the fi gure of the supernatural.

A year after he painted this portrait, Kishida wrote of his desire to ‘move away

from modern tendencies (kindaiteki no keiko)’, by which he meant the tendency

among his peers to emulate post-impressionist styles.34 His stated intentions

notwithstanding, the manipulation of light in his self-portraits that produced an

7 Ch’ae Yong-sin, Portrait of Chon U, 1911. Ink on silk, 92 x 57 cm. Seoul: National Museum of Korea.



imminence suggesting the absolute mutability of the self vibrated sympathet ically

with the emergence of another kind of time, one based on acceleration and teleology

as mediated through industrialization, Westernization, and territorial expansion

taking place at a then-unprecedented rate. Kishida saw himself as a prophet-like

fi gure, a seer whose place was less in the present than in the future.35 For him, the

self-portrait might not be in direct league with the state, but it was still tethered to the

latter’s sense of insistently forward linear movement.

Seen in this context, the lack of illumination in Self Portrait in Overcoat is especially

striking. It might initially be dismissed as a lack of technical knowhow on Ko’s part

were it not for the embedment of Western-style oil painting and a growing awareness

of photography among Korean painters at this time. Ch’ae Yong-sin (1848-1941),

himself a former Choson dynasty offi cial, produced ink-on-silk portraits that took

their cue from photography (plate 7). In his portrait of the scholar Chon U, the

shading of the face mimics the encounter between light and human skin as might be

found in a black-and-white photograph, infl uenced, perhaps, by the work of Ch’ae’s

second son Ch’ae Sang-muk, who ran a photo studio in the main Seoul thoroughfare

of Chong-no around 1915.36

Despite his professions to the contrary, Ko would have thus been aware of

different techniques of depicting light on a two-dimensional support. Ko seems less

interested in following the precepts of his teachers than in approaching the painting

as a territorial proposition. He diagrams pictorial space into sections -- yellow-

white fl esh, mahogany background, bluish black overcoat. Each area is distinctly

autonomous from one another, hence if the jaw line seems excessively worked, it

is because of its function within the painting as a threshold zone, there to separate

fl esh from fabric. Likewise, if the collar on the artist’s overcoat appears starkly

white, or if his hair seems preternaturally shiny, it is because they too act as areas

of border control. In painting his own portrait in this way, Ko raises the question

of whether such a demonstration of control may in fact be a politically mediated

act, a question that assumed special urgency by 1910, the year when Japan offi cially

annexed Korea.

Anachronism’s Timeliness and Nationalist DragIn March 1915, Ko graduated from the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. As part of his fi nal

requirements, he was required to produce and exhibit a self portrait (plate 8). Known

today as Self Portrait with Hat, it was shown alongside other self-portraits painted by Ko’s

classmates, nearly all of whom were Japanese.37 Most portraits conformed to what

were then general conventions for portraiture: a frontal view of the bust against a

monochromatic background. Ko’s compatriots at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts chose

to depict themselves wearing Western-style jackets or in haori, the traditional outer

layer worn over a kimono.38 They wore sombre greys and browns, often as a foil

against which to demonstrate their adeptness in handling light and shadow. Self Portrait with Hat is roughly identical to the other portraits exhibited in terms of size and style.

Like his classmates, Ko now conceives the face as an interaction between volumes

and planes rather than as a function of line and surface. There is an iridescence about

the portrait as a whole that suggests dutiful attention to the lessons in shading and

illumination so ardently promoted at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, even if Ko seems

not to have wholly embraced the radical manipulations of light that characterized the

work of his teachers and fellow students.

In Self Portrait with Hat, Ko consciously seized upon the idea of a type in order to

push back against conceptions of time associated with the Japanese colonial presence.


Joan Kee

Where Ko’s dress in Self Portrait with Overcoat demonstrated an intention to be at least

contemporaneous with his Japanese peers and their ideas of the modern, Self Portrait with Hat is anachronism with a vengeance. The work shows a young, smooth-faced

man dressed in a royal blue jacket fastened with two streamers at the chest. On his

head improbably rests an elaborate, multi-crested black horsehair hat of the type

worn traditionally in the Choson era by literati at home. The subdued, slightly

yellow background seems to have been painted with the colour of silk in mind, and

particularly of the silk used in traditional ink-on-silk portraiture. That Ko chose to

submit this work as his fi nal graduation project in a school at the heart of the imperial

metropole also suggests an effort to remind viewers of a time when Korea was a

sovereign kingdom.

8 Ko Hui-dong, Self Portrait with Hat, 1915. Oil on canvas, 73 x 53.5 cm. Tokyo: Tokyo National University of Fine Arts.



Nostalgia, however, was not the point. Ko was no Takahashi Yuichi, the Meiji

offi cial whose velvety depictions of objects and institutions long extinct positively

exuded longing for a world whose obsolescence was as universally acknowledged in

1870s Japan as the competitive drive of the newly revitalized Japanese empire. Korean

art historians and critics routinely interpret the portrait as a sign of racial pride or at

the very least, an assertion of ethnic identity in the face of Japanese colonial rule.39

Certainly the stark contrast between Ko’s dress and approach to dress versus that of his

Japanese colleagues might lead us to describe this portrait as an instance of nationalist

drag, where an individual deliberately wears clothing clearly attributable to a specifi c

nation in order to signal one’s allegiance to that nation. ‘Drag’, a word frequently used

to subvert what theorist Judith Butler described as ‘the law of heterosexual coherence,’

or the distinctions on which certain gender norms are based, is useful in thinking

through Ko’s anachronism as itself a means of simultaneously taking a political stand

against Japanese colonization and as a way of making real the ambivalence many elites

felt towards a changing social order whose norms were in fl ux.40

9 Sekino Tadashi, three-storey stone tower at P’yegu temple, Kankoku kenchiku chosa hokoku, 1904. Tokyo: Tokyo Teikoku Daigaku. Photo: Courtesy of the C. V. Starr East Asian Library, University of California, Berkeley.


Joan Kee

At this time, the Japanese state was as much concerned with establishing a

teleological order founded upon a distinct separation between past and present as

it was with territorial expansion. In fact, the former helped rationalise the latter. By

positing Korea itself as a past in need of preservation, a word much used in the early

years of occupation, the Japanese imperial regime could justify its occupation of

Korea as an act of protection; it is not a terminological coincidence, for example, that

Korea became a Japanese ‘protectorate’ in 1905.

This played out visually in the kinds of representations produced under the

auspices of the Japanese state. One of the most vivid expressions of this measure were

the photographs of Sekino Tadashi (1868-1955), whose writings constituted some of

the fi rst attempts at a systemised study of Korean art, architecture, and archaeology.41

Having already set its imperial sights on Korea, the Japanese government in 1902

sent Sekino, then an assistant professor of architectural history at Tokyo Imperial

University, to supervise the conservation of historically important monuments

on behalf of its future subjects who ‘did not know the importance of the ancient

remains and relics.’42 The actual subject of these photographs is the gaze of the state,

who, as historian Nishiyama Takehiko suggests, commissioned these studies as

‘preliminary’ acts that laid the groundwork for Korea’s colonisation.43 Published in

1904, Sekino’s survey of architectural monuments featured numerous photographs

which showed local Koreans depicted standing next to the monuments in question

(plate 9). Most were taken from a signifi cant distance, ostensibly in order to fi t an

entire structure within the confi nes of the photographic frame. Yet by including

local Koreans alongside the given subject, Sekino rendered the Korean body in

purely utilitarian terms, that is, as an index by which to measure the height and

girth of the inanimate subject. Shown wearing traditional dress, the Koreans

moreover functioned as temporal indices, emphasizing what was then an increasing

10 Sekino Tadashi, garden at Ch’angdok Palace, Kankoku kenchiku chosa hokoku, 1904. Tokyo: Tokyo Teikoku Daigaku. Photo: Courtesy of the C. V. Starr East Asian Library, University of California, Berkeley.



tendency to associate Koreans generally with an antiquated past incongruent with

the demands of the modern. These depictions contrasted sharply from the handful

of photographs showing Sekino or one of his Japanese colleagues together with their

subjects (plate 10). The pose and attire of these fi gures indicates the Japanese body

not as a passive means by which to confi rm the proportions of architecture but as an

autonomous edifi ce in its own right, able to exert proprietorship over the ground on

which it stands.

Interested in both the theory as well as the practice of art, it is very likely that Ko

knew of these photographs, in which the right of possession was implicitly proposed

as a defi ning characteristic separating the modern actor from his non-modern

counterpart. But what did it mean to reassert this right within the domain of artistic

production? As Ko repeatedly insisted, ‘I am not a politician. I am an artist.’44 While

some commentators have interpreted this statement and consequently, Ko’s works as

products of a mind ‘not infl amed by any urge for social reform’, this is not to say that

he regarded art as apolitical.45 Rather, the more relevant question concerned what

art could do within the bounds of its own material presence initially intended for a

particular time and place.

Of his years in Japan, Ko remarked:

While I was in Tokyo, a very curious thing happened. At that time there were

fewer than one hundred Korean students in Tokyo. All of us were drinking

the new air and embarking on new studies, but there were some who

mocked my choice to study art. A close friend said that it was not right for me

to study painting in such a time as this.46

‘Such a time as this’ referred to Japan’s annexation of Korea, an event that put those

Koreans studying in Japan in a peculiar situation. Ko himself felt as much when he

was physically detained overnight for questioning in the summer of 1910 by Japanese

colonial authorities.47 Despite being the nephew of the infl uential politician Ko

Yong-hui, then among the prominent Koreans serving in the newly installed Japanese

colonial government in Seoul, the younger Ko, like many Koreans studying in Japan,

drew the suspicion of an imperial government recently shaken by the assassination

of Prime Minister Ito Hirobumi by the Korean political activist An Chung-gun in

October 1909. Anxious to consolidate its authority over its subjects, the colonial

government closely scrutinized private actions.

As a former bureaucrat precocious enough to rise quickly in the faction-riddled

ranks of the late Choson court, Ko understood the repercussions likely to attend any

open displays of resistance or dissent. Yet he also felt the brunt of the shift brought

on by colonization: ‘from art school, I would trudge through the streets of Tokyo and

keen sorrow and rage festered in my bosom, refusing any relief . . . to friends, I raved

about what to do over our country’s situation, and questioned why I was studying

something so carefree as painting.’48

Under such circumstances, mere refl ection was insuffi cient. The act of

witnessing, or recalling past events on behalf of a given present, only served to

reinforce the sense of time wherein Korea and Korean culture were depicted as

being legible only under the rubric of a crystallized past. Art and archaeology played

an important role in establishing the notion of Korean backwardness (teitairon); as

Hyung Il Pai has discussed, the Japanese state selectively culled the anthropological

and archaeological data collected by Sekino and others for evidentiary support.49

Similarly, Kuraya Mika contends that the many Japanese artists who travelled to


Joan Kee

Korea shortly after its annexation depicted Korean subjects in a manner calculated to

reinforce the idea of a people mired in the past, and thus in present decline.50 For Ko,

the question of possession lay in destabilising the boundaries that otherwise parsed

time into teleological units, where the present took precedence of the past.

Self Portrait with Hat shows Ko fully facing the viewer, a convention that was

standard. But the viewer is positioned at somewhat of a distance from the actual face,

so that his attire is as central to the depiction as his face. The viewer is positioned

suffi ciently far away from Ko so that the entire hat, despite its height and width, fi ts

comfortably within the four edges of the canvas. Seen at such a distance, the self-

portrait cedes some of the presumptions of intimacy otherwise associated with the

genre. As Oh Kwangsu observed, ‘it would be more fi tting to describe the work as

a general portrait meant to convey the air of a Choson dynasty gentleman rather

than as a self-portrait.’51 The deliberation of Self Portrait with Hat was further borne

out by what Ko chose to prioritize within the painting itself. His face appears much

smaller and less distinct than before, an impression created by bathing most of

the face in shadow. The dappling causes the face to recede into the surface, which

then sets up what Ko wanted to emphasize, the depiction of attire. Almost half of

the available pictorial space is devoted to painting the jacket, whose rich colour is

further emphasized by its juxtaposition against a background that appears almost

pale gold on the left and pale violet on the right. Similar attention is paid to the large

three-tiered hat on whose behalf Ko purposefully elongates the canvas. That the hat

is comfortably included within the four edges of the canvas leads us to see it as an

inalienable part of the subject, together with the blue jacket. The large amount of

pictorial space devoted to the depiction of the hat and jacket strongly suggests that the

subject be read through these objects.

Here Ko establishes the artwork as an object intended to be seen iconographically

rather than through the lens of style, a confi guration that ran counter with what was

then the efforts of Kuroda Seiki and his colleagues at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts

to develop a particular mode of depiction that could uphold Meiji conceptions of a

civilized nation.52 It also ran counter to the kind of introspection that marked the self

portraits of Ko’s Japanese contemporaries like Kishida Ryusei. Ko’s friend, the curator

Ch’oe Sun-u, claimed that Ko may have been accepted and even popular among his

Japanese classmates at the Francophilic Tokyo School of Fine Arts due to the Korean

artist’s knowledge of French.53 Yet Taisho introspection was a luxury he could ill

afford, particularly in a time that remained very much wedded to Meiji imperatives of

national unity and conceptions of modernity as expressed through dreams of empire.

Visually, these imperatives played out in the increasing number of representations that

sought to isolate the Korean subject as a distinct racial type. Early precedents included

Hubert Vos’s famous portrait of King Kojong, which was exhibited at the Corcoran

Art Gallery in Washington D.C. as part of a series that, according to a review by the

famed writer Willa Cather, purported to be analytic studies of the ‘darker races.’54

Cather stated that it was Vos’s ‘theory’ that ‘such paintings would be invaluable to

anthropologists and would present these races in an entirely different light to home-

staying Caucasians.’55 The portrait of King Kojong seemed to achieve as much insofar

as his ‘foxy’ looks and ‘well-contented smile’ drew the attention of Cather who

regarded him as one that ‘had an exceedingly high opinion of himself.’56 By 1915, the

Korean subject had all but crystallized into a racial type. Japanese artists who travelled

to Korea often reifi ed the connection between Koreans and the colour white, an

association made notorious by the connoisseur Yanagi Muneyoshi as an example of

Korean ‘sorrow’ in his book on Korean art, Chosen to sono geijutsu, published in 1922.57



There is ample evidence to suggest that Ko understood the signifi cance of

dress in a way that set him apart from his counterparts. His contemporaries often

compared him to a ‘teacher of characters at a sodang (privately-run schools that offered

instruction in Chinese classics to primary- and secondary-school age students)’, was

almost always photographed wearing hanbok, or traditional dress.58 Ko also gained

notoriety for his long moustache, even inspiring the popular magazine Pyolgongon to

describe him in a review published in 1928 of ‘bewhiskered and bald men’: ‘among

artists’ moustaches, Mr. Ko Hui-dong’s is worthy to be their president.’59

In 1910, Ko would have sensed the renewed signifi cance of dress in a time whose

rate of change was perhaps best measured by the rate at which different factions of

society adopted different kinds of dress. The accelerated pace of adoption was already

apparent in the 1900s; Ko, for instance, recalled wearing Western-style uniforms

and ‘helmets over topknots’ while attending the Hansong French Academy.60 And

as the 1884 ordinance commanding all subjects to don the sober, almost clerical

turumagi indicates, dress had much to do with one’s standing in a larger social order

and others’ perceptions thereby. In the wake of the Kabo Reforms of 1894, traditional

hierarchies centred on the landed gentry were abolished and articles of clothing once

reserved for those of a particular class could now be worn by anyone able to afford

them. Hats worn exclusively by the upper classes, such as that worn by Ko in Self Portrait with Hat could, for example, became so common that by 1910 they were among

the cheaper types of hats available for sale.61

By the time of the Japanese occupation, clothes also served as a means of fostering

a sense of citizenship among the subjects of the ever-expanding Japanese empire.

While those in the countryside persisted in wearing what since the 1880s had been

referred to as hanbok, or Korean dress, those in the cities increasingly resembled their

counterparts in other urban areas throughout Japan’s empire. The similitude implied

a degree of cultural assimilation that dovetailed with the efforts of the Japanese state

to cultivate a sense of inclusion, at least among those best positioned to facilitate

imperial aims, namely, the educated and affl uent urban elite. Ko, who belonged to

this sector of Korean society, demonstrates as much in Self Portrait in Overcoat, where his

pomaded hair and neatly trimmed moustache was almost interchangeable with that

of his dapper Tokyo colleagues. He wears a navy-black coat known as a turumagi. The

result of a Choson royal ordinance issued in 1884, the turumagi was intended to lessen

the gap between offi cials and the common people. All citizens, except those over

the age of fi fty, were prohibited from wearing colourful silken garments formerly

worn to demonstrate a person’s superiority of wealth and class. One was permitted

to move outdoors only while wearing the turumagi.62 Although Korean in origin, the

colour and make of Ko’s turumagi roughly correspond to the haori worn by his Japanese

classmates. Similarly, Ko’s graduation photograph shows him wearing the same

single-breasted, black military jacket worn by his Japanese colleagues, an innovation

mandated in the mid-1880s by Mori Arinori, Japan’s fi rst minister of education,

who saw the universal adoption of military-style school uniforms based on Prussian

models as a means of consolidating the national body.63

Citizenship, or at least national affi liation through dress was pursued with

special vigour by Okakura Kakuzo, the writer and arts impresario who co-founded

the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. From 1886 until his death in 1913, Okakura engaged

in what art historian Christine Guth has called ‘cultural cross-dressing’, in which

he intentionally wore particular styles of clothes associated with particular cultures

in order to claim identity as simultaneously national and transnational. Of special

interest was his Daoist robes, which downplayed his Japaneseness in favour of a less


Joan Kee

identifi able Asianness, fi rst in India, and later in Boston, to which he travelled in 1904

(plate 11). They brought to life the slogan ‘Asia is one’, the fi rst line of his perhaps his

most famous work, The Ideals of the East, published in 1903, even as they ‘confi rmed

their [Bostonians’] expectations of Japan.’64

In Self Portrait with Hat, Ko seems to have taken Okakura’s cue, even though his

intent lay in undermining the concept of Asian oneness under the consolidating

forces of Japanese empire. He recalled as much in 1959: ‘at that time [I went to

Japan], the Great Korean Empire (Taehan cheguk, 1897-1910) was there. I was a rightful

Korean.’65 The colonisation of Korea raised the stakes of representation so that the

imperative lay in destabilising the boundaries that otherwise parsed time into

teleological units by actively mobilizing obsolescence, the condition of being out of

date, or out of alignment with a particular time.

At the same time, the presumptive 'past' also conveyed much about contemporary

concerns. Ko did not want to be mistaken for Japanese, yet he was just as anxious

not to be seen as merely another Korean, an anxiety that betrayed his attachment to

a class system now irrevocably compromised by the introduction of new priorities

11 A. Piatt Andrew, Isabella Stewart Gardner, Okakura Kakuzo, Caroline Sinkler and Henry Davis Sleeper at Red Rock, Gloucester, MA, 6 October 1910. Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Archives. Photo: T. E. Marr and Son.



that redefi ned notions of privilege and precedence. His rich blue jacket was a

striking contrast to the faceless multitudes shown wearing white, a colour which

some Japanese had very quickly associated with Koreans as an indication of an

ineffi cient culture mired in a time incompatible with the present. In his study of

Korean shamanist beliefs and practices, published in 1917, Goto Morikazu described

the wearing of white to be highly irrational due to the need of having to frequently

launder garments.66

More telling is Ko’s depiction of himself wearing a three-tiered version of the

chongjagwan, a hat worn throughout the Choson era only by the aristocracy. Most

versions had only two tiers, and those with more were considered extravagant by

Choson era standards.67 The annals of King Sunjong show that in 1910, Ko, then only

twenty-four years old, was promoted to the rank of third grade offi cial (chong 3 p’um), a

position which in present-day Korea would be roughly equivalent to one rank below

a cabinet vice-minister.68 Promoted only days before Japan offi cially annexed Korea,

the ambitious young artist may have regarded this self-portrait as an opportunity

to portray what might have been. The careful framing of Ko’s head and shoulders

alludes to commemorative portraiture, thus insinuating that Self Portrait with Hat was

in fact, meant to remember a time whose end was marked by the recognition of its

obsolescence.

Yet in consciously choosing to wear an item of clothing which, as art historian

Kim Yong-ch’ol notes, was not commensurate to Ko’s station in his previous life,

the artist refl ected the dynamics of an age whose temporality was most viscerally

experienced through perceptions of social standing.69 Though from an ancient

family who had ascended to considerable power and affl uence exceeding that

of many aristocratic families, Ko himself remained a member of the chungin, an

association that persisted despite the offi cial abolition of hereditary classes in

1894. Due in part to their technical and administrative skills, which often entailed

openness to foreign approaches to knowledge unmatched by any other sector of

society, they assumed a principal role in implementing many of the reforms designed

to mitigate the great disparities of the former class system. At the same time,

many chungin in the early 20th century perpetuated old models of social hierarchy

by recasting themselves in the role of the traditional aristocracy. Several took up

traditional aristocratic pursuits such as poetry and calligraphy, including Ko’s own

family, and in some extreme cases, certain families even changed their clan names in

favour of more aristocratic ones.70

Trapped in His Own Time?The luxury of self-fashioning enjoyed by Ko in a Taisho art world that celebrated the

artist’s capacity to visualise himself or herself as a singular entity took a different

turn once he returned to Seoul in May 1915. In the summer of that year, Ko painted

what is known today as Self Portrait, or Self Portrait with Fan (plate 12). Considerably larger

than the two portraits which preceded it, the work reveals more of how Ko perceived

his own situation as a newly minted professional artist in Korea. Where the other

two self-portraits kept the viewer at a distance, choosing to show Ko only against

the utterly atemporal space of the monochrome, Self Portrait with Fan incorporates the

viewer directly within the internal realm of the work. We see a body at rest, as might

deduced from his attire and his pose. Recalling earlier portrait practices, Ko depicts

himself fl anked by those objects with which he was most closely associated during

his youth, a shelf of books on the left and a framed oil painting just above his head

on the right. In various shades of burgundy, the books appear to be leather-bound,


Joan Kee

and of the sort Ko may have seen his diplomat father reading or that he himself might

have consulted as a student of French. The wide yellow frame of the oil painting

takes on something of the role of a halo, an allusion, perhaps, to the initial acclaim

Ko received from the mainstream Korean press upon his graduation from the Tokyo

School of Fine Arts earlier that year.71

The portrait is less a commemoration of Ko’s past than a refl ection of his

present. Early colonial Seoul was governed by other patterns of time; in lieu of the

recursion generated by a social system whereby inheritance was the primary form

of transmitting status, a premium was now accorded to notions of linear progress

as defi ned by the accelerated production and consumption of goods and services,

including art. While the former royal court had long commissioned portraits from

artists, by the 1910s, some artists had expanded their clientele to include Japanese

and Korean aristocrats who paid them lucrative sums; Kim Eun-ho, for instance,

12 Ko Hui-dong, Self Portrait with Fan, 1915. Oil on canvas, 60.8 x 45.5 cm. Gwacheon: National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea.



was so fortunate as to receive from a grateful sitter a thatched-roof house in the

desirable neighbourhood of Wonso-dong, near a former royal palace in Seoul.72 By

1914, artworks were being purchased directly from exhibitions, and in 1913, the

former court painting tutor Kim Kyu-jin founded what effectively was Korea’s fi rst

gallery, the Kogum sohwagwan.73 An arts emporium of sorts, the Kogum sohwagwan sold

both old and recent works, as well as painting materials.74 Taking full advantage

of Korea’s burgeoning print culture, Kim advertised the various functions of his

venture, which quickly prospered and eventually culminated in the launch of a

satellite branch in the northern metropolis of Pyongyang. Although Ko had visited

Seoul periodically during his years in Tokyo, the confl ation of art and commodity

provoked in the artist a rash of anxieties about his own place in this new world. No

longer a bureaucrat whose position was assured by virtue of birthright, Ko grappled

with the prospect of having to become a professional artist, later claiming that ‘the

act of purchasing a painting [at the time]. . . was regarded as an impropriety‘.75 The

success of Kogum sohwagwan indicates otherwise, as does the careers of artists like Ch’ae

Yong-sin, who, by virtue of passing the royal examinations was a member of the

yangban, the traditional ruling elite in Choson Korea. Yet Ch’ae voluntarily left the

royal bureaucracy in 1906 to paint full time, even going so far as to accept private

commissions, beginning in 1915.76 But in signing his works as ‘the former county

military chief of Chongsan’, Ch’ae also betrayed a desire to have viewers recognize

that he was no ordinary professional painter, an anxiety which was further refl ected

in Ko’s claims regarding the commodifi cation of art.

Ko’s concerns seemed especially pronounced given his engagement with oil

painting, a medium simultaneously considered as foreign and physically labour-

intensive. The materials of oil painting, as well as the convention of plein air

painting too readily emphasized the stigmatised relationship between artists and

common labourers. Ko seemed to have felt as much when he wrote that others

at the time thought it ‘unseemly’ of him to wander around the streets of Seoul

‘toting a sketchbox’ just as he had done while a student in Tokyo 77 In Self Portrait with Fan, the uncertainty of Ko’s position is conveyed through the groundlessness

of images, from the bookshelf that improbably appears to hover in mid-air to the

rectangular aperture in the upper right-hand corner that could easily be read as

either an oil painting or as a window looking out into the open. Indeed, the viewer

remains unsure as to whether he is completely indoors. The portrait takes place in

a small room he used as a studio while living temporarily in the grand 99-kan (the

largest size permitted for non-royal dwellings; each kan measuring approximately

1.8 meters) house of his paternal relatives in Susong-dong in central Seoul near

Kyongbok Palace, the former main seat of the Korean royal family.78 The bookshelf

affi rms the interiority of the wall. Yet Ko sits with one leg bent, with the other

outstretched or perhaps dangling freely from a low veranda as might be seen in a

traditional tile-roofed house of the sort common in early 20th century Seoul. One

hand clasps a fan, while the other recedes into the voluminous depths of the artist’s

silk trousers. The front of his white linen shirt hangs loosely, the two sides limp

as if in surrender to the oppressive heat and humidity of a Seoul summer. His face

glistens slightly, the result, perhaps, of perspiration rising to the surface. Glints

of light yellow and white illuminate the left side of Ko’s body, suggesting light

pouring forth from a source located just to the painting’s right. Yet Ko’s face remains

curiously impervious to the weather outside, his expression remaining impassive

throughout. Though his hair is close-cropped, a preemptive measure against the hot

summer days, the face is resolutely still.


Joan Kee

The picture ends with Ko’s left hand buried somewhere in the voluminous folds

of his silken trousers towards his crotch. His right leg is bent and perpendicular to

the rest of his body, thus framing the crotch area in a way that suggests an intention

to turn what might otherwise be private and hidden into the open. There is intent

to expose. ‘Exposure’ seems a particularly apt description, given the openly sensual

nature of the portrait. The fl at, impenetrable surfaces that defi ned Self Portrait in Overcoat now yield to a corporeality rarely found even in the depictions of nudes which Ko

painted while in Japan and which would soon appear in Korea. Smooth, fl at strokes

are interspersed with sinuous, occasionally abbreviated ones in order to make real

the body underneath the clothes. That this care is taken in representing the general

crotch area, or intersection at which the belly and legs meet, make this will to

corporeality seem intensely, even aggressively, intimate in a time and place where

even the very act of modelling, or renting another body for purposes of depiction,

was met with suspicion. Ko encountered this fi rsthand; no matter how much money

he offered, he was declined at every turn.79 Eventually he had to settle for those at the

fringes of society, such as labourers and kisaeng, paid female entertainers, or in one

case, the daughter of the gutterman (ch’aengjangi).80

Ko similarly offers himself to the viewer. He wears only a lightweight linen shirt

known as a choksam, whose unbuttoned front reveals a generous glimpse of his chest.

A modifi ed version of the chogori, the traditional jacket for the upper body, the choksam

was formerly worn primarily by commoners as either an undergarment or while

engaged in some form of manual labour. The artist seemed to recognize his changed

status, recalling on numerous occasions the mockery of friends and neighbours

who said he resembled nothing as much as a ‘cigarette or taffy seller,’ a particularly

damning remark in a society where making one’s livelihood through trade was still

regarded as the province of the lower classes.81 Ko found himself torn between two

modes of recognition, between painting as a distinctly non-professional pursuit and

painting as a means of livelihood. That Ko felt this tension keenly was conveyed some

years later when he recalled how people at that time castigated artists as nothing

more than ‘hwanjaengi,’ a derogatory colloquialism levied against artists in Korea since

at least the seventeenth century.82

The artist vividly channelled these anxieties through the image of the hand.

Apart from the face, the artist’s right hand is the most concretely defi ned image in

the painting. It grasps a fan, which allows Ko leave to display its musculature. Four

fi ngers curl over the fan’s wooden handle, with a thumb that points directly back at

the artist. In spending so much time painting the hand with which he used to write

and paint, Ko was able to refl ect upon what for him was its newfound signifi cance.

The thick, sturdy fi ngers of peach, mauve, and white were no longer those of an

elegant court offi cial whose days were spent cloistered behind the solid wooden gates

of the royal palace. Their grasp on the fan’s slender wooden handle is resolute, and

their musculature suggests a proclivity for, or at least receptivity to, physical labour.

Ko was acutely aware of how many linked painting, and especially Western-style

oil painting to menial, and even agrarian, labour. In subsequent recollections, he

frequently mentioned how bystanders ridiculed his ‘foul-smelling’ oil paints that

resembled nothing so much as ‘chicken shit.’83

More than almost any other work produced at this time, Self Portrait with Fan

portrayed the rawness of the ambivalence with which Koreans regarded the

destabilisation of the Choson social order. Contrary to the frontal gazes of his earlier

portraits, and for that matter, of most Korean self-portraits, Ko trains his gaze at

a point somewhere beyond the viewer as if embarrassed about witnessing this



level of self-exposure. He regards himself as if he were, in fact, naked, a situation

which recalls the distinction between nudity and nakedness which, despite the

taxonomisation of art into genres and styles in Japan during the late nineteenth

and early twentieth centuries, had never fully relinquished its capacity to provoke

and unsettle.84 For Ko, who singled out his experiences of having to draw live nude

models as the most ‘bewildering’ of all, the precariousness of the nude-versus-naked

boundary was a means through which to grapple with a society whose norms had so

radically changed as to make it diffi cult to confront directly.85 Just as Ko ‘could not

bring himself to look directly frontwards’ at a woman in the nude, he could not bring

himself to directly scrutinise the degree to which life in early colonial Seoul forced an

exposure of its underpinnings.86

Aversion, however, was not evasion. In looking so decisively at an undisclosed

point beyond the immediate surface of the painting, he appears to situate himself

outside pictorial space. The direction of Ko’s gaze redirects our own so that we see

clearly the portrait’s disjunction of scale. Despite the relative largeness of the canvas

vis-à-vis his earlier portraits, Ko barely fi ts within its edges. As if to emphasize this,

his head, even when shaved, almost kisses the painting’s upper edge. The razor-thin

sliver of negative space generates an urgency that intensifi es when pressure is brought

to bear on the painting’s lateral edges by way of the severely tilting books on the left

and the window/painting wedged so tightly in the upper right-hand corner. The

aggregate result is a fatal compromise of the ostensible image of a man at leisure.

Ko’s open shirt, perspiring brow, and fan takes on new meaning as a claustrophobe’s

response to a space that now appears more as a space of enclosure than one meant

for private respite. Ko literally does not fi t within the canvas, just as his status as a

professional painter made him ill-suited for a rapidly changing society perhaps best

refl ected by the tendency among the more elite classes to cling desperately to the

norms of the past. If the artist sits stoically, it is because the space in which he resides

demands his immobilization.

Eventually Ko would be at the forefront among those individuals most committed

to developing the artistic profession as denoted by his establishment in 1918 of the

Calligraphy and Painting Association (Sohwa hyop’hoe), the fi rst professional artists’

group in Korea. In his 1931 overview of artists in Korea, the writer Yi Ha-gwan

praised Ko for helping to elevate the status of the painter ‘from a maker of paintings

to that of an artist.’87 Circa 1915, however, Ko seemed primarily concerned with

the peculiar demands of that particular time, which seemed to run at an accelerated

pace. When confronted with a shifting social structure best exemplifi ed by the

absence of consensus, however, the artist can do nothing more than confi rm his own

sense of paralysis. The conclusion is deeply pessimistic, and may be why Ko never

chose to exhibit it in public during his lifetime, or even display the work within the

relative privacy of his own home or to his own family. Indeed, the portrait was only

discovered in 1972, after Ko’s closest relations prepared to sell the family home.88

That the painting was in very poor condition suggests that it was stored away for

years, indicating, perhaps, that the artist regarded the work as being too entrenched

in a moment whose relevance had passed.

The self-portraits of Ko Hui-dong embody what might be described as the

predicament of understanding the potential of contemporaneity in a time that

seemed overly determined by the imperatives of a certain model of modernity

predicated on teleology and the attendant destabilisation of long-standing norms

of social order. Being contemporary meant pushing back against what the modern

symbolised at that time–linear forward movement bent on rationalization, conquest,


Joan Kee

and certainty. In taking stock of these different kinds of time, Ko and his self-portraits

anticipated ‘hyondae misul,’ the term used to describe both modern and contemporary

art in Korea, which was fi rst used in the early 1920s to describe works that resonated

with the present moment. Although its use was mediated by how historians and

critics at the time understood its Japanese cognate, gendai bijutsu, the meaning of

hyondae misul remained uncertain, used interchangeably to refer to both modern

and contemporary art.89 Ko’s self-portraits embodied this uncertainty by evoking

multiple temporal vectors which collectively diminished the legibility of distinctions

otherwise separating past from present. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that these

works would enjoy renewed attention in the 1970s, when Korean art historians

evinced a renewed interest in the historicization of modern and contemporary art.90

The uncertainty imparted by Ko’s self-portraits took a new turn around 1925,

for it was then that Ko would return for good to ink painting. Always sceptical about

Western-style oil painting which he said was far too involved with the ‘explanation

of objects,’ and on capturing the external appearance of things, Ko regarded this turn

as the need to go beyond a dichotomous framework.91 Critics at the time, praised

this turn as a welcome gesture of ethnic consciousness; the painter An Sok-ju, Ko’s

colleague in the Calligraphy and Painting Association remarked that Ko’s turn was

‘not simply a matter of selecting ink or oil, but rather has to do with the artist as

an Oriental (tongyangin) choosing the easier means through which to express the

sensibilities and aesthetics of Orientals’.92 Yet in returning to ink painting, a medium

which by 1925 was increasingly perceived as suffi ciently removed from what was

then regarded as ‘modern’ as to be considered ‘traditional’, Ko was in fact attempting

to push back against a particular conception of time calibrated according to a

hierarchical sense of nations in which the adaptation of Western things fi gured as the

standard by which development was measured. The force of Ko’s push carried over

into both his ink paintings, which tended towards the orthodox, and his insistence

on wearing hanbok well into the 1940s and 50s when almost all Korean public fi gures

had adopted Western-style suits.

In thinking through Ko’s works, the broader intent of this article is to propose

a different system of assessment that values works according to what they might say

about the condition of being contemporary. Where the idea of modern art is already

fraught with baggage, the connotations associated with the contemporary are still

relatively free from such. At the very least, it is a state over which no single person,

event, region, medium, or context assumes a monopoly. In so doing, this article also

suggests that Ko’s self-portraits might themselves be considered as an argument on

behalf of contemporaneity as a means of levelling a fi eld whose unevenness continues

to obstruct a clear view of the world at large.

Notes1 Ko’s status as Korea’s fi rst oil painter has occasionally been questioned

by art historians who cite artists like Chi Un-yong (1852-1935) and

Yi Chong-ch’an, whose studies of oil painting in Shanghai and the

US in the early years of the 20th century respectively predate those

undertaken by Ko in Tokyo Yun Pom-mo, ‘1910 nyondae soyang

hoehwa suyong kwa chakka uisik’, [The absorption of Western

painting in the 1910s and artistic consciousness], Misulsahak yon’gu

203 (September 1994): 114. On Chi Un-yong see ‘Yuhwa haksupch’a

ch’ongguk sangghaehaeng’, [Student of oil painting bound for

Shanghai], Hwangsong sinmun 23 November 1904. Yi returned to Korea

from the U.S. in 1909. For a brief overview of painting in Korea in the

late 19th and 20th centuries in English, see Kim Youngna, ‘Introduction

to Modern Korean Art in the Colonial Period’, 20th Century Korean Art, London, 2005, 10-39. For an examination of Ko Hui-dong’s career

in English see ‘Bridging the traditional and the modern: Korea’s

fi rst Western style painter Ko Hui-dong’, Ch’ungok Ko Hui-dong 40 chugi t’ukbyoljon, [Retrospective exhibition of Ko Hui-dong on the fortieth

anniversary of his death], Seoul, 2005, 18-29.

2 Redza Piyadasa, ‘Early Modern Art Developments in Malaysia and

Singapore, 1920-1960’, The Birth of Modern Art in Southeast Asia: Artists and Movements, Fukuoka, 1997, 229.

3 Hong Son-p’yo, Imiji, [Image], eds. Yu P’yong-gun and Chin Hyong-jun,

Seoul, 2002, 286-288.

4 Yoshida Chizuko, ‘Tokyo bijutsu gakko no gaikokujin seito’, [Foreign

students at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, part two], Tokyo geijutsu daigaku



bijutsu gakubu kiyo, 34, 1999, 45.

5 Yi Ku-yol, ‘1910nyon chonhugie naehanhaetdon ilboninhwagadul’,

[Japanese artists in Korea before and after 1910], Han’guk hyondae misul ui hurum [The current of modern Korean art], Seoul, 1988, 174-175. On

Yamamoto’s studio, the Yoga sokushukai, see Yi Ku-yol, ‘Soyanghwadan

ui t’aedong’, [The beginnings of Western painting], Misul charyo, 14,

December 1970, 13-16.

6 Park Suhee, ‘Choson hugi Kaesong Kim ssi hwawon yon’gu’, [A study of

the Kaesong Kim painters in the late Choson era], Misulsahak yon’gu, 246-

247, September 2005, 9. Kyung Moon Hwang also suggests that the

relatively downgraded status of court painters was because they did

not have to pass an examination to obtain their position and because

their work recalled those done by lower-ranking classes. ‘The Chungin

of the Late Choson and Early Modern Eras: The State, Specialists, and

Legitimacy’, Yoksa wa silhak, 21, January 2001, 235.

7 For a detailed description of Ko’s lineage, see Kyung Moon Hwang,

Beyond Birth: Social Status in the Emergence of Modern Korea, Cambridge and

London, 2004, 141-147.

8 Ko Hui-dong, ‘Wuich’ang Oh Se-ch’ang sonsaeng’, [Mr. Oh Se-ch’ang],

Sinch’onji, 9:10, July 1954, 185.

9 Ko Hui-dong, cited in ‘Hwabaek Ko Hui-dong ssi kajong’, [The family

of the artist Ko Hui-dong], Yosong, 2:7, July 1937, 64.

10 Ko Hui-dong, ‘Shinmunhwa turoolttae: chwadamhoe’, [Upon the

arrival of the ‘new culture’: a roundtable discussion], Chogwang, 7:6,

June 1941, 124.

11 Horace N. Allen, Supplement to A chronological index: Some of the chief events in the foreign intercourse of Korea from the beginning of the Christian era to the twentieth century, Seoul, 1901, 8.

12 Kim Youngna, ‘Chont’ong kwa hyondae ui saieso: urinara ui ch’ot

pontchae soyanghwaga Ko Hui-dong’, [Between the traditional and the

modern: Korea’s First Western Style Painter Ko Hui-dong], Ch’ungok Ko Hui-dong 40 chugi t’ukbyoljon, [Retrospective exhibition of Ko Hui-dong on

the fortieth anniversary of his death], Seoul, 2005, 19.

13 Yun, ‘1910 nyondae soyang hoehwa suyong kwa chakka uisik’, 115. For

an account of this show see ‘Yomyonggi hoesangnok’, [Memories of

twilight], Choson Ilbo, 17 June 1939.

14 Hong Son-gyun, ‘Choson hugi ui soyang hwagwan’, [Views on

Western painting in the late Choson era], Han’guk hyondae misul ui hurum

[The current of modern Korean art], Seoul, 1988, 155.

15 Quoted in Yi Songmi, Choson sidae kurimsok ui soyanghwabop [Western-style

painting techniques in Chosun dynasty paintings], Seoul, 2000, 85.

16 Ibid., 206-7. An traveled to Shanghai on two occasions, fi rst in 1891,

and later in 1899.

17 Ko Hui-dong, ‘P’igonhan choson yesulgye’, [The tiresome world of

Korean art], Choson chungang ilbo, 6 May 1935.

18 Ko Hui-dong, ‘Na ui hwap’ilsaenghwal’, [My life as a painter], Seoul sinmun, 11 March 1954.

19 Yi Sung-man, P’ungnyusesigi, [An almanac of taste], Seoul, 1977, 198. The

fi rst Korean to enrol in the school was Pak Chin-yong, who enrolled in

the nihonga division in 1908.

20 On the dating controversy see ‘Han’guk ch’oego ui yuhwa nonjaeng’,

[Controversy over the oldest Korean oil painting], Han’guk ilbo, 28 May

1981.

21 Yi Ku-yol, ‘Top’an haesol’, Han’guk kundaehwa sonjip I [Collection of

modern Korean painting], Seoul, 1990, 114.

22 Oh Kwang-su, Han’guk kundae misulsasang not’u, [Notes on modern Korean

art], Seoul, 1987, 141.

23 Yun, ‘1910 nyondae soyang hoehwa suyong kwa chakka uisik’, 123.

24 Kang Jong-sik, unpublished conservators’ report, National Museum of

Contemporary Art Korea, 1983.

25 On Ko’s initial understanding of oil painting as a medium defi ned

fi rst by its materials, see Ko Hui-dong, ‘Na ui hwap’ilsaenghwal’, Seoul sinmun, 11 March 1954.

26 Ko Hui-dong, ‘Hwap’il saenghwal osimnyone ich’yojiji annun il

segaji’, [Three things I can’t forget in my fi fty years of artmaking],

Tonga Ilbo 5 January 1959.

27 Ko Hui-dong, ‘Hwap’il saenghwal osimnyone ich’yojiji annun il

segaji’, Tonga Ilbo, 5 January 1959. Ko attended preparatory classes

operated by the Tokyo School of Fine Arts from the beginning of April

to the end of June, 1909.

28 Ko, ‘Hwap’il saenghwal osimnyone ich’yojiji annun il segaji’.

29 Yi Sung-man, P’ungnyusesigi, 198.

30 See, for example, Donald F. McCallum, ‘Three Taisho artists: Yorozu

Tetsugoro, Koide Narashige, and Kishida Ryusei’, Paris in Japan: The Japanese Encounter with European Painting, Tokyo and Saint Louis, 1987, 81,

Gennifer Weisenfeld, Mavo: Japanese artists and the avant-garde, 1905-1931,

Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2002, 19, Kitazawa Noriaki, Kishida Ryusei no Taisho avangyarudo, [Kishida Ryusei and the Taisho avant-garde], Tokyo,

1993, 14-24.

31 Joseph Koerner, ‘Self-portraiture direct and oblique’, Self Portrait: Renaissance to Contemporary, London, 2005, 81.

32 On Kishida’s admiration of Dürer, see Kishida Ryusei, ‘Jibun no

funde kita michi’, [The path taken of myself], Kishida Ryusei zenshu, [The complete works of Kishida Ryusei], 2, Tokyo, 1979-80, 518-530.

Originally published in April 1919.

33 Joseph Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art, Chicago and London, 1997, 39.

34 Kishida Ryusei, Bi no hontai, [The true form of beauty], Tokyo, 1985,

172.

35 Kitazawa Noriaki, Kishida Ryusei no Taisho avangyarudo, 39.

36 Chong Chun-mo, ‘Sokji hoehwa ui kundaesong t’amgurul wihan

siron’, [A proposal for examining the modernity of Ch’ae Yong-sin’s

paintings], Sokji Ch’ae Yong-sin, Seoul, 2001, 70.

37 Throughout its history, the Tokyo School of Fine Arts attracted students

from all over Asia and even some from Europe, particularly after the

colonisation of Korea. Yet at the time of Ko’s enrollment, non-Japanese

students were an extreme minority. See Yoshida Chizuko, ‘Tokyo

bijutsu gakko no gaikokujin seito’, 143.38 The catalogue accompanying the exhibition ‘Remaking Modernism

in Japan, 1900-2000’, held in 2004 at the University Art Museum at

the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music (formed in 1949

when the Tokyo School of Fine Arts merged with the Tokyo Music

School) and the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo offers some

indication of what the show might have looked like. This ambitious

survey of modern art in Japan was organized into sections, one of

which featured a wall of self-portraits painted by graduates of the

Tokyo School of Fine Arts. See Remaking Modernism in Japan, 1900-2000,

Tokyo, 2004, 111.

39 Yi Ku-yol, ‘Top’an haesol’, Han’guk kundaehwa sonjip I, 115.

40 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, New York, 1999, 175.

41 For an overview of Sekino Tadashi’s work in Korea see Woo Dong-

son, ‘Sekkino Tadasi ui han’guk kogonch’uk chosa wa pojone taehan

yon’gu’, [A study of Sekino Tadashi’s research and conservation

efforts concerning Korean traditional architecture], Han’guk kunhyondae misulsahak, 2003, 211-235.

42 Sekino Tadashi, Ancient Remains and Relics in Korea: Efforts Toward Research and Preservation, Tokyo, 1931, 3.

43 Nishiyama Takehiko, ‘Han’guk konch’uk chosa pogoso ui susukkekki’,

[The riddle of the Korean architectural report], Han’guk ui konch’uk kwa yesul, [The architecture and arts of Korea], Seoul, 1990, 477.

44 Yi Kyungsung, ‘Ko Hui-dongnon’, [A treatise on Ko Hui-dong],

Yesulwonbo, 9, 1965, 125.

45 Hong Yong-son, ‘Han’guk kundae misul ui son’guja Ch’ungok Ko Hui-

dong’, [A pioneer of modern Korean art, Ko Hui-dong], Hyondae ui nun, 5, March 1980, 5.

46 Ko Hui-dong, Ko Hui-dong, ‘Na ui choson sohwa hyop’hoe sidae’, [My

time in the Choson Calligraphy and Painting Society], Sinch’onji, 21,

February 1954, 182.

47 Reported in the Hwangsong sinmun, 22 July 1910.

48 Quoted in Kim Yun-su, ‘Ch’ungok Ko Hui-dong kwa sinmisul

undong’, [Ko Hui-dong and the new artistic movement], Ch’angjak kwa pip’yong, 8:4, December 1973, 1021.

49 Hyung Il Pai, Constructing ‘Korean’ Origins: A Critical Review of Archaeology, Historiography, and Racial Myth in Korean State-Formation Theories, Cambridge,

2000, 35-36.

50 Kuraya Mika, ‘Künstler auf Koreareise. Das Fremde in japanischem

Blick (1895 und 1945)’, [Artists on a trip through Korea: the Other in

the Japanese view (1898 and 1945)], Comparativ Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte und Vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung, 6:3, March 1998, 82-97.

51 Oh Kwangsu, Han’guk kundae misul sasang not’u, [Notes on the ideas of

modern Korean art], Seoul, 1987, 1945.

52 For discussion on Kuroda’s efforts in this regard, see Takashina Shuji,


Joan Kee

‘Kuroda Seiki to ‘kosoga’’, [Kuroda Seiki and ‘conceptual’ painting],

Kindai gasetsu: Meiji bijutsu gakkaishi 1:1, 1992, 124-129.

53 Ch’oe Sun-u, ‘Ko Hui-dong hwabaek kwa Cho T’aek-won sonsaeng’,

[The artist Ko Hui-dong and master Cho T’aek-won], Tongso munhwa, 7:4, April 1977, 19. Yi Ku-yol asserts that Ko’s French accent and

conversational skills were better than his Japanese instructors, ‘Ko

Hui-dong’, Misul, 1, June 1964, 34.

54 Willa Cather, The World and the Parish: Willa Cather’s Articles and Reviews II, ed.

William M. Curtin, Lincoln, 1970, 811.

55 Cather, The World and the Parish, 811.

56 Cather, The World and the Parish, 812.

57 On the connection between this association and theories of Korean

national stagnation prevalent in Japanese historical discourse of the

early 20th century, see Kim Brandt, Kingdom of Beauty: Mingei and the Politics of Folk Art in Imperial Japan, Durham and London, 2007, 31.

58 As cited in ‘Hwabaek Ko Hui-dong ssi kajong’, Yosong, 2:7, July 1937, 64.

59 ‘T’opsokburi wa taemori taep’ump’yonghoe, utjianul saramun

ipjangbulho’, [A comprehensive review of bewhiskered and bald men,

those who do not laugh, cannot enter], Pyolgongon, 18, January 1928,

135.

60 Ko Hui-dong, ‘Shinmunhwa turoolttae: chwadamhoe’, 131.

61 Yamaguchi Sei, Choson sanopji [Korean industry news], Seoul, 1910, 522-

523.

62 Han’guk minsok taegwan 2, [A general survey of Korean folk customs],

Seoul, 1980, 262-263.

63 Mori Arinori, Kyoikuron: Shintai no noryuku, [A theory of education: the

aptitudes of the body], Tokyo, 1879. On the politics of school uniforms

in modern Japan see Sharon Kinsella, ‘What’s behind the fetishism of

schoolgirls’ uniforms in Japan’, Fashion Theory, 6:2, June 2002, 215-237.

64 Christine Guth, ‘Charles Longfellow and Okakura Kakuzo: Cultural

Cross-Dressing in the Colonial Context’, Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, 8:3, 2000, 623.

65 Ko Hui-dong, ‘Hwap’il saenghwal osimnyone ich’yojiji annun il segaji’,

[Three things I can’t forget in my fi fty years of artmaking], Tonga Ilbo, 5

January 1959.

66 Goto Morikazu, Chosen no fuzuoku, [The shamanistic beliefs and practices

of Korea], Tokyo, 1917, 6-11.

67 Yi Kyong-ja, Hong Na-yong and Chang Suk-hwan, Uri ot kwa changsingu, [Korean clothes and accessories], Seoul, 2003, 50.

68 Choson wangjo sillok, [Annals of the Choson Dynasty], Sunjong sillok, [Annals

of King Sunjong], book 5, volume 4, chapter 12, side A, 19 August

1910.

69 Kim Yong-chol, Sojangjakp’um kirok chongbi saop che 1 ch’a chamun

hoeui kyolgwa pogo, [Review of artworks in the collection, the fi rst

report on the results of the consultation meeting], unpublished report,

Museum of Contemporary Art Korea, 18 September 2007, 4.

70 Hwang, 115, 126, 158.

71 ‘Soyanghwaga ui hyosi’, Maeil Sinbo, 11 March 1915

72 See Choi Youl, Han’guk kundae misul ui yoksa 1800-1945, [The history of

Korean modern art], Seoul, 1998, 99.

73 Choi Youl, Han’guk kundae misul ui yoksa 1800-1945, 99, 115.

74 Choi Youl, Han’guk kundae misul ui yoksa 1800-1945, 99.

75 Ko Hui-dong, ‘Yonyech’onilyahwa’, Seoul sinmun, 3 December 1958.

76 Chong Chun-mo, ‘Sokji hoehwa ui kundaesong t’amgurul wihan

siron’, [A theory for investigating the modernity of Ch’ae Yong-sin’s

paintings], Sokji Ch’ae Yong-sin, 70; also see Cho Son-mi, ‘Ch’ae Yong-sin

ui saengae wa yesul – ch’osanghwarul chungsimuro’, [The life and art

of Ch’ae Yong-sin based on his portraiture], Sokji Ch’ae Yong-sin, 58. Ch’ae

later advertised his services to a general public.

77 Ko Hui-dong, ‘Na wa choson sohwa hyop’hoe sidae’, 182.

78 Yi Ku-yol, ‘Top’an haesol’, Han’guk kundaehwa sonjip I, 115.

79 ‘Yanghwasuip ui son’guja’, [A pioneer in the introduction of oil

painting], Tonga Ilbo, 6 January 1940.

80 Yanghwasuip ui son’guja’. Ko based a painting submitted to the 1915

Korean Industrial Exposition on a photograph of a twenty-nine year

old kisaeng named Ch’ae-gyong playing the komungo, a traditional zither.

See Yanghwa ui songu, model ui sonpy’on, [A pioneer of oil painting, a

pioneer of models], Maeil Sinbo, 22 July 1915.

81 Ko Hui-dong, ‘Na wa choson sohwa hyop’hoe sidae’, [Me and the days

of the Choson Calligraphy and Painting Society], Sinch’onji, 21, February

1954, 182.

82 Ko Hui-dong, ‘Yonyech’onilyahwa’, Seoul sinmun, 3 December 1958.

83 Ko Hui-dong, ‘Shinmunhwa turoolttae: chwadamhoe’, 125. Also see

Ko Hui-dong, ‘Hwap’il saenghwal osimnyone ich’yojiji annun il segaji’,

Tonga Ilbo, 5 January 1959.

84 On the provocations caused by the nude-versus-naked divide in Japan

see Alice Tseng, ‘Kuroda Seiki’s Morning Toilette on Exhibition in Modern

Kyoto’, Art Bulletin, 90:3, September 2008, 417-440, Alicia Volk, In Pursuit of Universalism, Berkeley, 2010, 52-73.

85 Ko Hui-dong, ‘Hwap’il saenghwal osimnyone ich’yojiji annun il segaji’.

86 Ko Hui-dong, ‘Hwap’il saenghwal osimnyone ich’yojiji annun il segaji’.

87 Yi Ha-gwan, ‘Chosonhwaga ch’ongp’yong’, [A general review of artists

in Choson], Tonggwang 21 (May 1931): 68. Choson refers to what is now

Korea. The original translation reads, ‘Hwagongurobut’o hwaga.’ The

traditional word for artist, ‘hwagong’ literally means ‘one whose work

it is to paint.’ My translation attempts to underscore the difference

between hwagong and hwaga, a term introduced at the end of the late 19th

century to refer more specifi cally to modern ideas of a professional

artist.

88 On the circumstances of the painting’s condition and discovery, see

‘Han’guk ch’oego ui yuhwa nonjaeng’, Han’guk Ilbo, 28 May 1981.

89 One particularly important example was the art historian Ko Yu-

sop. For an overview of Ko’s training and career see Kim Youngna,

‘Han’guk misulsa ui t’aedu: Ko Yu-sop: ku ui yok’halgwa wich’i’, [Ko

Yu-sop, a luminary within Korean art history: his contribution and

position], Misulsa Yon’gu, 16, 2002, 503-518.

90 Among the better-known examples of the spate of art historical studies

of modern Korean art in the 1970s are: Kim Yun-su, Han’guk hyondae hoehwasa [History of Modern Korean Painting], Seoul, 1975; Yi Kyong-

song, Hyondae han’gukmisul ui sanghwang [The situation of modern Korean

art], Seoul, 1976, and Oh Kwang-su, Han’guk hyondae misul ui tanch’ung [The dislocations of modern Korean art], Seoul, 1978. Of special note

was Kim’s proto-revisionist history which tried to explicitly track and

evaluate art according to sociopolitical phenomena and Oh’s work,

which briefl y suggested that the modern era began when scientifi c

rationalism made its appearance in Korea vis-à-vis the dual channels of

Choson- Qing relations as well as the emergence of the philosophical

school known as silhak during the late eighteenth century.

91 Ko Hui-dong, ‘Soyanghwarul yon’guhanun kil’, [The path of exploring

Western-style painting], Sohwa hyop’hoebo, 25 October 1921, re-

published in Chohyong kyoyuk 10, 1994, 241.

92 An Sok-yong (An Sok-ju), ‘Hyopjon insanggi’, [A review of the

exhibition], Choson Ilbo, 1 November 1929, cited in Kim Youngna,

‘Chont’ong kwa hyondae ui saieso: urinara ui ch’ot pontchae

soyanghwaga Ko Hui-dong’, 15.

Documents

Contemporary Art in Early Colonial Korea: The Self Portraits of Ko Hui-dong