Korean Inks Record the Personal Cosmos

We like to believe that it’s a modern idea to do art for its own sake rather than as a profit-making activity. As a matter of fact, like many a good impulse, it harks back to ancient Asia. We’re reminded of this by a lovely new exhibition at UCLA’s Fowler Museum of Cultural History, “The Fragrance of Ink: Korean Literati Paintings of the Choson Dynasty (1392-1910).”

It consists of some 60 rare scrolls, albums, fans and screens selected from its collections by the Korea University Museum, Seoul. With work being shown outside the country for the first time, the traveling survey is circulated by the University of Chicago’s David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art.

Korea’s educated elite served in taxing and tedious posts as civil servants and Confucian scholars. Painting and writing calligraphic verse became a form of relaxation practiced for oneself and one’s friends. It should not, however, be confused with the kind of therapeutic dabbling done by amateurs today. It was informed by sophisticated cultivation in art and literature.

No one familiar with traditional Asian art will be surprised to learn either that this art was initially influenced by Chinese models or that the Koreans transposed the inspiration into something distinctly their own. Over time, they evolved their own genre, adding earthy humor to the mix and developing a unique “true-view” landscape based on direct observation rather than stylized prototypes. By the 18th century, literati painting was relatively democratized so that it was made by court and professional painters sprung from the lower ranks of a traditionally hierarchal culture.

The more fine-tuned meanings of these changes are necessarily blurred for a Western viewer, but not the essential character of the art. It tends to be woollier and more dynamic than other Asian styles. Chong Son, for example, is credited as the founder of the “true-view” landscape. An 18th century artist from an impoverished scholar’s family, he traveled widely about the country responding to the particularities of geography. In a work like “Diamond Mountains,” he achieves the rather unsettling effect of seeming to record the actual geological formation of the terrain while it’s in progress.

It’s impossible to say exactly how this outcome is created, but significant to note that enough other artists cause the same feeling that it becomes an almost generic trademark. A fan by Chang Si-hung is titled “Peach Blossom Spring,” but it suggests scudding clouds forming poetic hallucinations of galloping horses in the sky. An extremely handsome eight-part screen by Cho Chong-gyu called “Landscape of the Four Seasons” gives a different spin to this sensation of a moving surface. His various views of mountains and valleys seem to almost cinematically materialize and disappear in atmosphere.

Teasing such feelings of sensate actuality from such a stylized art is a noteworthy achievement. Set in comparison to its more familiar Chinese prototypes, one notices that, when heroic, it’s less pompous, and when eccentric, less self-conscious. The net impression is an art that feels more realistic.

It might be said that the larger quest of Western Modernism was to convince this civilization to take a tip from Asian wisdom and accept art as a frankly stylized metaphor of reality rather than the literal impersonation we have embraced since the Renaissance.

Since we persist in preferring movies and television to abstract art, the effort clearly failed. An exhibition like this reminds us that it was still a good idea. This is an art in which pictorial representation and its extension into written language are all of a piece. The intertwining elegantly allows the individual to create a personal cosmos as large as his imagination and as supple as the simplicity of his means. Doing all that with just brush and ink is a wonder of expressive economy.

There’s a great lesson here. Even visitors unfamiliar with Confucian symbolism and unable to decipher Korean calligraphy can come away with a sense of what individual artists intended expressively because the drawn line is eloquent in itself. We know that Yi Kyong-yun’s “Album of Figures in a Landscape” is modest, straightforward and amused. We see that Yu Tok-Chang’s “Bamboo” was made by someone detached, masterful and a little ironic. Kim Hong-do’s rendering of an immortal playing an instrument under a tree makes us almost hear its flutey sound.

* The UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, through June 8, closed Monday and Tuesday, (310) 825-4361.