Sometimes it seems that the farther you go, the closer you get to home. Currently at the Royal Ontario Museum is an exhibition by 19th-century Korean painter Gim Gisan, and while this exhibit might seem distant in time and place, it has one very immediate connection to U of T students: it’s being co-curated by a U of T doctoral candidate, Christina Yee-Heon Han.
The ROM’s Gisan exhibit, which inaugurates the opening of the new Herman Herzog Levy Gallery, opened in late December and runs until September.
The ink paintings by Gisan, made to accompany a late 19th-century missionary lecture, stand out from other Gisan collections thanks to their dimensions.
“The paintings are huge. Normally Gisan worked on small paintings-these are 123 centimetres by 72 centimetres, and they’re fully coloured. Most of Gisan’s other paintings are in ink,” says Yee-Heon Han.
Gisan’s work is dispersed throughout the world, with pieces in Seoul, New York, London, Chicago, and at the Smithsonian Institute.
“Just because they have a piece doesn’t mean it’s on display, though,” explains Yee-Heon Han, who has been with the ROM for two years.
Gim Gisan’s other connection with the University of Toronto was his friendship with a 19th-century Presbyterian missionary to Korea, James Scarth Gale. Gale graduated from U of T in 1889 and went to Korea that fall, funded by the university’s YMCA. One of his first books was a translation of Pilgrim’s Progress into Korean, for which Gim Gisan made illustrations. Progress can be seen in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library.
Gisan’s paintings are distributed around the world because he sold many paintings to Victorian tourists wanting souvenirs of their journey to Korea.
“I’m sure they wanted to take something back that would show how people lived, says Yee-Heon Han. Just as it was a window onto Korea for westerners of the Victorian period, Gisan’s art is now a way for modern-day Torontonians to imagine Korea at the end of the 1800s.
But Gisan’s paintings have a spiritual as well as a nostalgic purpose, though they portray people doing ordinary tasks such as hat-making and weaving. Yee-Heon Han has discovered that the paintings illustrate a lecture promoting missionary work in Korea. Several different Canadian, British, and American missionary boards were at work in Korea by 1900, and Canadian missionaries were among the first westerners to visit a newly opened Korea.
The Christian origins of these Gisan paintings belie the artistic tradition within which Gisan worked.
“Gisan’s paintings don’t come out of the blue. From the early 18th century, a century and a half before Gisan was active, court artists painted farmers, women at their homes, craftsmen. This genre was picked up by folk or artisan painters, people who made ancestor portraits and so on. In the 1880s, Korea was forced to open its borders to traders and missionaries. Gisan, who did the paintings already, adapted his tastes to foreigners. I personally don’t think Gisan himself is nostalgic,” says Klaas Ruitenbeek, the chair of Far Eastern Art at the ROM.
Ruitenbeek’s comments highlight the importance of Korean history in interpreting Gisan’s art. Gisan painted at a crucial point in Korean history, only a few years before the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1910. Nicknamed by western travel writers “land of morning calm”-a translation of choseon, a name for Korea-Korea was anything but calm after being opened to the west in 1882.
Yee-Heon Han says it is significant that Gisan showed great interest in domestic production methods such as weaving and pottery.
“At this time factories were being built, doing damage to small-scale production. Before this, people were more self-sufficient. For Gisan to capture this in such detail is, I think, interesting,” she says.
The political context of Korea in the late 19th century was actually used to help date the paintings. In the rolled-up paintings found at the ROM was an old map of Korea still showing Taiwan as an independent nation. Taiwan, previously known as Formosa, became a colony of Japan in 1910. The exact date the paintings were made is still unknown.
The origin of the paintings also remains something of a mystery, two years after their discovery among the ROM’s vast collection of objects. It is not known who donated them, or when.
“We simply discovered a bunch of rolled-up paintings wrapped in newspaper that had been lying around for 20 years. I had a feeling about them-they had no signature or seal, but they are quite distinctive, so I checked with people who know about Gisan. It’s simply undeniable that they are his. The faces of the people are very typical-also the subject matter,” says Ruitenbeek.
With about 100,000 Koreans living in the GTA, Ruitenbeek expects the exhibit to be meaningful on a personal as well as an artistic level for some visitors. The paintings may have been made for 19th-century western missionaries, but nostalgia and cultural contact fascinates us all.
Korea around 1900: The Paintings of Gisan runs until September 2006 at the Royal Ontario Museum. (Student admission to the museum is $12.)v
