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Perhaps because many of its influences came from China, Korean art rarely gets a fair share of attention in the West. Now Paris' Guimet Museum is helping right that imbalance with "The Poetry of Ink: The Literati Tradition in Korea, 1392-1910," a dazzling display of rarely seen Choson-era art from the museum's own treasures as well as private collections. As the exhibition's title suggests, the highlights are calligraphy, painting and poetry...
...scholar-officials, or literati, who for political or personal reasons, often had little else to do. The idea of using simple calligraphic brushstrokes to create lyrical paintings (many of which featured poems along their borders) reached Korea in the early Choson period some 600 years ago. Judging by the Guimet show, which runs until June 6, the technique thrived in the Land of Morning Calm. The museum has turned its exhibition space into a haven of tranquility, with rooms of graceful scrolls and elegant screens as well as antique furniture, porcelain, and writing accessories?more than 150 works in total...
...Guimet curators make the point that by blending Song and Ming styles, the Choson artists created their own pictorial vocabulary, one more personal, more poetic and closer to nature than their Chinese contemporaries'. historically, Koreans have certainly felt that their country is one of uncommon beauty?and this delight in their natural setting is evident in the exhibition's evocative landscape paintings. The Korean artists pay particular attention to the subjects in the foreground?mountains, plants, trees, rocks?leaving the background almost empty to maximize the feeling of depth and provide a sense of perspective that their Chinese counterparts often...
...course, screens like this are associated more with Japan than China. And the Guimet show acknowledges the back-and-forth influences between peninsular Korea and island Japan, especially after the fall of China's Ming dynasty in 1644. But Japanese screens were mainly intended to remain stationary, while those in Korea were designed to be portable. As the French journalist-diplomat Georges Ducrocq wrote 100 years ago, "When they cannot enjoy the countryside, the Koreans have their screens to provide them with the illusion of it." And though people in 21st century Paris can't go back to the kingdom...
...floating world" remained buoyant until the early 20th century, when the pleasure districts were undermined by the forces of modernization and Meiji-era reforms. The Grand Palais show's principal organizer, Guimet curator H?l?ne Bayou, sensibly stops at the late 19th century, when Japanese artists began to look beyond scenes of city life and toward the countryside. Thus, you won't find any works here by Katsushika Hokusai or Ando Hiroshige, two giants of Japanese landscape prints. Less defensibly, you also won't find much about the enormous impact ukiyo-e had on Western artists, especially France's own Impressionists...