Art Review : Vibrant Signs of Their Times : ‘Korean Arts’ is a sumptuous survey chronicling the output of the late Chosun Kingdom, an era of prodigious cultural development amid social transformation.

Immortal peaches. What a concept!

Several East Asian cultures claim peaches as a common and appropriate symbol for eternal life and, even though I cannot say from whence this enticing symbolic image came, a pair of monumental folding screens currently in an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art emphatically declares its gorgeous rightness.

“Sun, Moon and Immortal Peaches,” whose eight panels were probably painted a bit later than the 18th Century, is an idealized landscape of dizzying beauty. Sharply stylized in design, the pair of four-panel screens display a rigorously bilateral symmetry, as if the left and right halves are mirror images of each other.

A golden, misty sky envelopes blue-green mountains that loom above the serpentine waves of a blue-green sea, punctuated by lacy white fingers of foam. From rocky outcroppings dotted with red fungus, two gnarled peach trees frame the scene. Above them, a perfect white disk is precisely matched by a perfect orange one, balancing the moon and the sun in a harmonious equation, like yin and yang.

Obvious signs of ancientness and immortality are abundant: craggy mountains, a horizonless sky, the lapping sea, the sun and moon. Some are more obscure, such as the curlicue fungus, which is of a type used to make a longevity potion. And then there are the peaches.

The peaches thrive in a ritualistically patterned landscape where earth, sea and sky meet. They stand out from their surroundings because, alone among the otherwise highly stylized pictorial elements, they are rendered with a careful naturalism. It is a naturalism that contrasts sharply with everything else.

Like fat, fleshy, fuzzy, blush-colored little rumps, the corpulent peaches luxuriously seduce the eye. They promise sensual rewards that are frankly erotic.

At nearly 9 feet high and 11 wide, “Sun, Moon and Immortal Peaches” stands grandly at the entrance to “Korean Arts of the 18th Century: Splendor & Simplicity,” a quietly sumptuous survey of 125 examples of furniture, calligraphy, textiles and, most notably, paintings and ceramics. The show chronicles the artistic output of the late Chosun Kingdom (roughly 1724 to 1800, and coincident with the reigns of Yongjo and Chongjo), which is widely regarded as an era of prodigious cultural development amid far-reaching social transformation.

Organized by the Asia Society Galleries in New York, in collaboration with the National Museum of Korea in Seoul, the spaciously installed exhibition is divided into three sequentially smaller parts. The first looks at the art of the royal court, the second at the domestic art of the hereditary aristocracy and the newly rising professional class (which included artists), the third at religious art.

Formally, the most immediately striking feature of court art is not its often ostentatious splendor. You expect showiness from royalty, of any time or place.

Emphasized instead is a structural commitment to a gentle but rigorous ideal of orderliness and regimentation. A silk panel of indigo blue with seemingly abstract, decorative gold disks is actually a sky map celebrating an earthly relationship to the Big Dipper, a constellation perpetually visible in the Korean night.

Nearby, an eight-panel screen documenting a “Royal Visit to the City of Hwasong” maps out the processional journey with all the orchestrated detail of a tactical battle plan. The composition is bureaucratized: From a distance the screens seem like diagrams, or even pages from a highly refined accountant’s ledger.

The composition, shown as a bird’s-eye view rather than from within the hurly-burly of the traveling throng, overlays a godly omnipotence on the royal doings. There is a place for everything in the Chosun Kingdom, and everything is contentedly in its place--especially the king, who acts as a kind of divinely ordained pivot between an expansive universe and secular society. Life’s value is found in identifying one’s place within the timeless clockwork.

The domestic arts in the second section retain something of this feeling, but scaled down to a more personal, intimate level. (Color drains too, usually replaced by muted tones.) An exquisite, highly refined self-portrait by Yun Duso describes the artist’s features; yet, it also pictures a quest for self-knowledge, meticulously conducted through the medium of painting.

Instead of wholly imaginative renderings, such as those found in the royal screens, paintings of actual sites in the Korean landscape also begin to appear. These so-called “true view” paintings signal a significant shift from imaginative symbolism to worldly affairs.

Even here, however, the emphasis is on idealization. Vistas worthy of being painted are determined according to highly acculturated principles, in which ideas of scenic beauty are preconceived. A farmer isn’t portrayed merely tilling his field; he’s glimpsed beyond an artfully placed and shaped tree, beneath which two men contemplatively sit. A “true view” privileges some landscapes over others, so that all is right with the carefully ordered world.

Among the most beautiful objects in the show are the ceramics, especially the large storage jars of glazed porcelain (several have been designated as official national treasures). Some are elegantly painted with traditional dragon motifs, using iron-brown or cobalt-blue underglazes, while one employs an eccentric mixture of landscape designs within cartouches surrounded by formal characters signifying wealth, longevity and strength.

The most exciting porcelain, however, is a milk-white monochrome jar, not at all rigidly symmetrical in its swelling, ovoid form, but nonetheless full and radiant as the moon. The bulgy, slightly irregular shape of the 19-inch pot yields an earthy quality of organic liveliness, subtly endowing the fired porcelain jar with the vitality of a living thing.

The final, relatively small gallery focuses on religious objects and subjects, including ancestor worship, shamanistic rituals, Buddhist shrines and ritual implements. After the relatively restrained royal and domestic sections, a surprising wildness marks some of this work--especially the Buddhist paintings and carvings, perhaps because of the prevalence of mythological subjects. Imaginative flights of dramatic, colorful intensity are not uncommon.

Still, it may be incorrect to consider Korean religious art of the 18th Century as distinctly different or in a class by itself. Competing sects of Buddhism and shamanism didn’t dominate the era, Confucianism did. As might be expected from a philosophy vigorously promoted as normative by the ruling classes, Confucian principles are imbued throughout the secular and courtly art in the rest of the show. They can’t be separated out.

You wouldn’t really know that from the exhibition, though. A drawback of “Splendor & Simplicity,” which presents the late Chosun Kingdom as a kind of East Asian Enlightenment, on which the modern era would rest, is its reluctance to contextualize this art in any but the most rudimentary way. (The show’s informative catalogue is therefore essential to read.) The exhibition is content to marshal its considerable resources in order to seduce you with the formal power of its often gorgeous objects.

* Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 857-6110, through Aug. 28. Closed Monday and Tuesday.