Bamboo in Mist

Mounted as a hanging scroll, this long, rectangular painting by Kim Kyu-chin is executed in ink on silk and depicts bamboo in mist. The several very slender stalks of bamboo rise from a small, grass-covered hillock in the lower right corner. The composition is organized around the one very tall and several short stalks of bamboo that are depicted in black ink and that are thus to be read as nearest the viewer; the tallest of those stalks rises through the composition on a slight diagonal and reaches almost to the upper left corner. Several additional stalks of bamboo, some tall, some short, are depicted in gray ink, indicating both that they are slightly farther away from the viewer and that they are partially obscured by heavy mist. All of the bamboo stalks, whether painted in vibrant black or pale gray ink, appear in the foreground plane; the composition does not recede into deep three-dimensional space, so no middle- or background elements are included. The leaves and stalks are well painted; in addition, the varying heights of the bamboo stalks and the varying tonalities of ink lend visual and aesthetic balance to the composition. The artist's two-column inscription and signature appear in the lower left portion of the painting; planned as an integral element of the composition, they fill an area that otherwise would have been blank, resulting in an unbalanced composition. The painting is not dated, but it is one of the artist's mature works and it reflects the influence of the Japanese Nanga style, indicating that it was painted at the end of the nineteenth or, more likely, during the first one-third of the twentieth century.