This study contains new findings and interpretations of the works of Ko Huidong as a pioneering figure of the New Art Movement in early-modern Korea, tracing his transformation from a civil servant to an artist, and again from a Western-styled painter to an oriental painter. More specifically, this study examines, in depth, the process in which Ko decides, circa 1926, to oriental paintings exclusively after years of producing works of both Western and oriental styles. This study then engages in an analysis of the themes and styles of these works to cast a new light on Ko’s creative world.
Ko is Korea’s first painter in the Western style. Subsequent generations of Koreans have tended to focus on him as an introducer and pioneer of Westernstyled painting in Korea. However, after his return to Korea, Ko also became active as a key figure of the New Art Movement, founding artist associations, attempting to converge Western and oriental styles, teaching art, working as an illustrator, and even writing on the history of art. In particular, he identified the practice of indiscriminate copying as the chief culprit for the decline of Joseonstyled painting, and stressed that Koreans be reborn into moderns through autonomous creation, recommending “nature-derived” realism, originality, and autonomy as the key means to that end. He also campaigned for the elevation of painters from mere artisans to artists; organizations of galleries and exhibitions; foundation of art schools; pioneering of new genres of art; and the transition from medieval painting to creative art. All these causes formed his drive for the socialization and popularization of modern art.
Ko mastered both the traditional style of painting characteristic of the late Joseon period, and the impressionistic style of painting imported from the West. Although he learned and specialized in Western-styled portraits at Tokyo University of the Arts, he consolidated his turn to nature-derived realism after his return to Korea. Accordingly, he abandoned oil paintings in favor of oriental ink paintings, and dedicated his remaining career to the realization of Korean aesthetics, portraying Geumgang Mountain, praised as one of the most beautiful landscapes on the Korean Peninsula. He believed that the key to modernization of traditional paintings lay in the convergence of oriental and Western styles, and attempted at such convergences of his own, such as adding watercolors to traditional compositions or motifs. Yet these attempts fell short of being truly innovative, for Ko was content with mere formalistic twists that did not fully outgrow the medieval idealism and that failed to achieve full shift to modern themes.