[KS] The "Korean Man" identified.

[Frank Hoffmann]

Dear Henny and All:

You may then be interesting in reading Thijs Weststeijn and Lennert 
Gesterkamp's 2016 article:
"A new identity for Rubens's 'Korean man': Portrait of the Chinese 
merchant Yppong," in: _Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art_ 66, no. 
1 (2016): 142-169

It is a very solid piece of research and much fun reading.
And so is Stephanie Schrader's piece for the 2013 exhibition at the 
Getty in L.A. (in; _Looking East: Rubens's Encounter with Asia_).

In the 2016 piece Weststeijn and Gesterkamp identify the Chinese 
merchant "Yppong" as Xing Pu 興浦, and from what you post here, 
Weststeijn has now acknowledged that it is not 興浦 but 吳浦 = Wu Pu. 
Sure looks more like "Wu" (O in Korean) than an abbreviation of 
"Xing" to me.
(See attached image from the 2016 Weststeijn / Gesterkamp article). 

As a side note:
Weststeijn's summary from the conference paper you quote is utmost 
bewildering from the perspective of art history (and Weststeijn himself 
is art historian, I believe). 

 > These findings inspire the observation 
 > that the common tendency to study images in relation to other images 
 > rather than to historical reality may be counterproductive. Too much 
 > fear of a positivist ‘fallacy’ may confirm the 
 > dynamic of Orientalist or ‘exotic’ projections, whereas an encounter 
 > between individuals actually took place.

This statement kind of throws art history out the window all together.
Nothing is ever that simple. Even when interpreting and explaining a 
photographic portrait one has to consider other images to produce a 
meaningful description and understanding of the work and the 
intellectual environment it was produced in. Everything happens in a 
cultural and political context. Images always live in a context, and 
that context is by no means just the context of what "actually took 
place." 

Apart from that strangely non-art historical conclusion, the 2016 
article is very intersting!

Henny, if you're aware of a follow-up article, please let us know.

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Best,
Frank





On Sat, 03 Aug 2019 12:27:34 +0900, Henny Savenije wrote:
> By chance I was alerted to a conference held in Shanghai Fudan 
> University and one of the speakers had the following summery
> 
> 
> A Chinese Visitor to the Netherlands in 1601: The Hakka Merchant Wu 
> Pu and his Portrait by Peter Paul Rubens 
> Thijs Weststeijn, Utrecht University/University of Amsterdam
> m.a.weststeijn at uu.nl
> Among the onlookers Rubens depicted in The miracles of Saint Francis 
> Xavier, one figure has drawn the particular attention of art 
> historians. On the basis of his dress, 14 facial features, and 
> curious hat, he has been connected to a drawing in the Getty 
> Museum known as the ‘Korean man’. In this talk I will defend my 
> thesis that the drawing was, in turn, based on a work by another 
> artist. This was a portrait of an individual: a Chinese merchant who 
> travelled on a VOC ship --in fact the first East Asian 
> to visit Europe whose identity is documented in such detail. The new 
> conclusion is based on an album amicorum of the Middelburg lawyer 
> Nicolaas de Vrise (1595-1609). 
> An inscription in Chinese and an additional explanation in Latin 
> identify the sitter as the Chinese merchant Wu Pu, who arrived in 
> Middelburg on 31 May 1600. Additional Dutch and Chinese sources 
> document Wu Pu’s career after his return to Southeast Asia, 
> as a middleman for the VOC. These findings inspire the observation 
> that the common tendency to study images in relation to other images 
> rather than to historical reality may be counterproductive. Too much 
> fear of a positivist ‘fallacy’ may confirm the 
> dynamic of Orientalist or ‘exotic’ projections, whereas an encounter 
> between individuals actually took place.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>                  _   _
>                 (o) (o)
>      oOOO----(_)----OOOo---
> Henny (Lee Hae Kang)
> -----------------------------
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_______________________________
Frank Hoffmann
http://koreanstudies.com