Orchid and Rock: The Essence of a Gentleman (Kunja Munjong)

The jagged edge of a faceted rock appears at the extreme right margin of this composition; a cluster of flowering orchids grows atop the rock, its longest, most attenuated leaves bending downward and to the left, as if dangling precariously from a cliff. Four inscriptions fill the empty spaces that once surrounded the painted imagery: two by Japanese statesmen who held high-level positions during the period of Japanese colonial rule (1910-1945); one by a Korean scholar and patron of the arts; the fourth by the artist, Kim Ŭng-wŏn, who inscribed and signed the painting with his sobriquet in the void between the rock and the dangling orchid leaves. The precise circumstances under which this painting was done and inscribed is unknown, but the presence of an calligraphed title by Count Terauchi Masatake (1852-1919), Governor-General of Korea between 1916 and 1919, would imply this was painted at a special gathering that took place some time during his term. In both China and Korea, scholars embraced the orchid as the perfect emblem of the Confucian gentleman, as indicated by this painting’s inscribed title. The orchid points to the gentleman’s elegant, learned manner, the rock to his unwavering, upright character; the combination of orchid and rock symbolizes the Confucian gentleman’s erudition, cultivation, loyalty, and personal integrity. In addition, the orchid held a fascination for literati painters because its grass-like leaves and simple, delicate flowers lent themselves to depiction with calligraphic brushwork. From an aesthetic point of view, Chinese and Korean painters delighted in pairing orchids and rocks, the orchids coaxing the artist to employ his most delicate, flowing, curvilinear brushstrokes, the rocks tempting him to present his most forceful, expressionistic brushwork. Chinese artists began to paint orchids during the Song dynasty (960–1279), the subject becoming ever more popular in the succeeding Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties. By the seventeenth century the taste for paintings of orchids had spread to Korea, where such works enjoyed considerable vogue in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.