Chŏng On-nyŏ (b. 1920)
"Diamond Mountains", 41.5 x 31.7 cm, oil on canvas, 1995
_______
|next ->|
| Chŏng
On-nyŏ (b. 1920) Like her colleagues Na Hye-sŏk and Paek Nam-sun (wife of the painter colleague, Im Yong-nyŏn, who seems to have been forced to go north with the Northern army in the fall of 1950), Chŏng On-nyŏ is one of the few women artists who were already active during the colonial period. Still, Chŏng represents the next generation, contemporaneous with the South Korean artist Ch'ŏn Kyŏng-ja, with whom she attended school in Japan. Born in 1920 in Kangwŏn Province, Chŏng became active only at the very end of the colonial period and produced most of her output in post-Liberation North Korea. She graduated from the Women's Art School in Tokyo in 1941, and then, in 1943, from the Fine Arts Department at the Tokyo College of Humanities. From 1952, she worked as a painter for the Korean Artists Union, and from 1964, she has worked for the Chagang Province Art Creation Center. Today Chŏng is probably North Korea's most prominent woman artist. Many of her (often monumental) works on political subject matters have been displayed at the P'yŏngyang Art Museum, and in September 1994, she was honored with a solo exhibit in the P'yŏngyang International Culture Center. She remains very productive, and with smaller landscapes such as the Diamond Mountains piece on display, which is one of many variations of her 1968 prize-winning work, she has found a market among the Japanese and Korean-Japanese tourists interested in art. |
_______
|next ->|