"White plum (I)", 59 x 87.1 cm, watercolor, 1964
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| Yi
Sŏk-ho (1904-1971) Born in Ansŏng, Kyŏnggi Province, Yi first studied traditional brush painting under Kim Ŭn-ho, one of the three great masters of the late Chosŏn/early colonial period. Following Kim's style of modernized brush painting, Yi painted traditional subject matter—flowers, birds, mountain landscapes, and human figures—with realistic expression, making extensive use of coloration, detailed depiction, and linear perspective. Beginning in 1934, Yi participated in several national exhibitions and, from 1936 to 1943, organized several group exhibitions of the so-called Huso Club (with Kim Ki-ch'ang, Yi Yu-t'ae, et al.), a group of painters who favored a modernized version of oriental ink painting. Unlike most artists, rightist and leftist (Kim Ki-ch'ang, Chŏng Hyŏn-ung, et al.), Yi resisted the pressures to produce propagandistic art for Japan's war effort, and chose to retreat to the countryside in 1940 to wait for the war to end. After Liberation, he joined the Korean League of Plastic Art and later the leftist Korean Fine Arts League. In 1949, he held a two-man exhibition with Yi Ŭng-no, one of the Korean intellectuals who were later kidnapped by Kim Chong-p'il's KCIA agents while living in exile in Europe. In the fall of 1950, Yi moved to the North when the Northern army retreated. Both during and after the Korean War, he oversaw the production of the military AgitProp artists within the Korean Artists Union. From 1959 to 1963, he served as chairman of the Korean-style Painting Committee of the Union, and therefore was responsible for the application of chuch'e ideology to Korean painting through the creation of chosŏnhwa (the term had been used before, but without the ideological connotations it received in the late 1950s). Yi is also known for his calligraphy of the title words on North Korea's only fine arts journal Chosŏn misul (discontinued). He appears to be the only 20th century painter in North Korea whose œuvre has been honored with a monograph (1992). |
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