The exhibition, a settler’s gaze, and a hardening style

The account reads the 1920s and 1930s under colonial modernity and under the fact of study abroad. In the 1920s, the Joseon Art Exhibition set overseas-trained painters against domestic groups. Among the latter was the Okdongpae — Kim Jung-hyeon, Kim Jong-tae, and Yoon Hui-sun. Landscape, in this telling, often carried a colonial settler’s spectator gaze: a country looked at, more than a country lived from the inside.

In the 1930s, model-based outward realism hardened into gwanhakpung, an official-exhibition academicism that later dominated the national exhibition. Opposite that current stood a moderate post-impressionist modernism, and an avant-garde close to Fauvism and Cubism that led toward early abstraction. The opposition is left as the account draws it, without a later official count of works or of prizes.

Names, a society, a school, and a workshop

Western painting is grouped with care. Overseas: Yi Jong-woo, Kim Chang-seop, Gong Jin-hyeong. Gwanhakpung: Kim In-seung, Shim Hyeong-gu, Yi Ma-dong, Do Sang-bong. Moderate modernism: Oh Ji-ho, Kim Ju-gyeong, Yi In-seong. The avant-garde: Gu Bon-ung, Yi Jung-seop, Kim Whan-ki, Yoo Young-kuk. Early overseas self-portraits include Go Hui-dong’s portrait in a jeongjagwan, work by Kim Gwan-ho and Kim Chan-yeong, and Na Hye-seok’s self-portrait and a Spanish harbor. Yi Jong-woo is also named for still life.

In Oriental painting, the 1923 Dongyeonsa group — Yi Sang-beom, Noh Su-hyeon, Byeon Gwan-sik, Yi Yong-woo — is tied to sinnamhwa and to local landscape. Kim Eun-ho is named for beauties and for flowers and birds. The Seohwa Association, founded in 1918, held fifteen exhibitions until 1936 and was dissolved after Yi Do-yeong’s death in 1933, amid internal discord and a Government-General halt order. An Imperial Art School opened in 1929 and was renamed in 1935. Yi Sang-beom is read as a defeatist colonial aesthetic, like a lament on the ruins of a fallen country. Kim Bok-jin taught sculpture at a YMCA workshop in 1925 and, after his release, opened the Kim Bok-jin Art Institute. Those dated facts are left as they are given.

Sources

1. an account of Korean art in the 1920s and 1930s under colonial modernity and study abroad, following the Joseon Art Exhibition, gwanhakpung and its opposites, named painters in Western and Oriental work, the Seohwa Association (1918–1936), the Imperial Art School (1929, renamed 1935), and Kim Bok-jin’s 1925 workshop, without later official counts.

Last updated: 14 November 2026