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Lot Essay
Kim Yusong, an artist in the Choson Royal Academy of Painting, and the calligrapher Sung Dai Joong, a government clerk, accompanied the 11th Korean mission to Japan between 1763 and 1764. During their travels, Yusong corresponded with the Japanese literati painter Ike Taiga (1723-1776). A two-page colophon appended to this album was writtten in Chinese in the summer of 1764 by the connoisseur Kimura Kenkado (1736-1802), the owner of a sake company in Osaka who entertained the envoy's party in Japan. It recounts that the album is a treasured gift made upon their return to Korea in appreciation of Kenkado's cordiality. On the same visit Kenkado presented several carved stone seals, including the Sajip seal used here, to the album's calligrapher, Sung Dai Joong, which are now in the collection of the Amagasaki City Educational Association (Amagasaki shi kyoiku iinkai; see reference below). Kenkado was a man of cultivated tastes and wide interests who invited many guests from Japan and overseas to enjoy his hospitality and art collection. He was a literatus and trained as a Kano-style painter. He was among the circle of the eccentric Kyoto monk Koyugai, or Baisao, "the old tea seller" (1675-1763), who marketed sencha, tea in leaf as opposed to powdered form, which came to be associated with Zen and literati, including Ike Taiga.
Yusong was a follower of Chong Son's "true view" landscape tradition which chose as its subjects the mountains and rivers of Korea rather than the traditional landscapes adapted from Chinese prototypes. There are ten extant paintings by the artist in Korea and several in Japan.
For other paintings by the same artist and calligrapher see Kokoro no koryu Chosen tsushinshi: Edo jidai kara 21 seikie no messeji/Korean missions to early-modern Japan: An appeal from the Edo period for Japanese-Korean friendship in the twenty-first century, exh. cat. (Kyoto: Kyoto Bunka hakubutsukan and Kyoto Shinbunsha, 2001), pl. 142 and pls. 155-56 (for the seals presented to the calligrapher); The Fragrance of Ink: Korean Literati Paintings of the Choson Dynasty (1392-1910) from Korea University Museum, exh. cat. (Seoul: Korean Studies Institute, Korea University, 1996), pl. 11.
Yusong was a follower of Chong Son's "true view" landscape tradition which chose as its subjects the mountains and rivers of Korea rather than the traditional landscapes adapted from Chinese prototypes. There are ten extant paintings by the artist in Korea and several in Japan.
For other paintings by the same artist and calligrapher see Kokoro no koryu Chosen tsushinshi: Edo jidai kara 21 seikie no messeji/Korean missions to early-modern Japan: An appeal from the Edo period for Japanese-Korean friendship in the twenty-first century, exh. cat. (Kyoto: Kyoto Bunka hakubutsukan and Kyoto Shinbunsha, 2001), pl. 142 and pls. 155-56 (for the seals presented to the calligrapher); The Fragrance of Ink: Korean Literati Paintings of the Choson Dynasty (1392-1910) from Korea University Museum, exh. cat. (Seoul: Korean Studies Institute, Korea University, 1996), pl. 11.