Na Hyesŏk

Biography

On 18 and 19 March 1921, an exhibition of seventy oil paintings opened in the hall of the newspaper Kyŏngsŏng Ilbo in Seoul. About five thousand people came on the first day, and about twenty works were sold. The artist was Na Hyesŏk, and no Korean woman had held such an exhibition before.

She was born in Suwon in 1896. The sources disagree on the date: 18 or 28 April.

Her father, Na Gijŏng, was an official with views that were progressive for the time, and so his children, sons and daughters alike, were sent to the new schools. As a girl she began drawing early: she wandered around Suwon sketching the fortress, the pavilions and the lake. In 1913 she graduated from Jinmyeong Girls’ School in Seoul with the best results in her class, and a newspaper even reported it. On the advice of her elder brother Na Kyŏngsŏk she went to Tokyo and enrolled in the oil painting department of a women’s art school. In Tokyo she joined the circle of Korean students, and in April 1915 she became one of the organizers of an association of Korean women students; she wrote for a student journal, and in one of her early articles she criticized the ideal of the “good wife, wise mother”. When her father demanded that she abandon her studies and marry, she returned home for a time, taught drawing at a girls’ school for about a year, and saved enough to go back to Tokyo. In 1918, having finished the school, she returned to Korea, taught at schools in Seoul and in the same year published the story “Kyonghui”. Its heroine, a student in Japan, refuses an arranged marriage and wants to live as an independent person. The story is often called one of the first feminist works of Korean literature.

In 1919 Na Hyesŏk was arrested in connection with the March 1st Movement protests against Japanese colonial rule and was held in prison for about five months. What exactly her role was is still disputed: according to the investigation records, she denied taking part and was released. In 1920 she joined the circle of the literary magazine Pyeho and contributed to the magazine Sinyoja (“New Woman”).

In April 1920 she married Kim Woo-young, a lawyer and future diplomat, after setting conditions before the wedding, among them that he would not interfere with her painting. Announcements of the wedding were printed in a newspaper for several days. Her husband was posted to Andong in Manchuria, and she lived there and opened an evening school for women. In 1923 she wrote an essay on motherhood in which she reproached her husband for leaving the raising of the children entirely to her. From 1922 onward she sent works almost every year to the Joseon Art Exhibition, run by the colonial administration. Her “Garden in Fall” won fourth prize, “Nangrang Tomb” third, and “Tianhou Temple” in 1926 and “Garden” in 1931 received special awards. Her landscapes are firmly constructed, with a confident touch; one example is “South Gate of Bonghwan Fortress” (1923).

In June 1927 she set off with her husband, who had been sent on a trip abroad, on a journey of about twenty-one months: through Manchuria and Russia to Paris, then Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, Italy, England, Spain and the United States. She is considered the first Korean woman to have visited Europe and America. Her husband went to study in Berlin, while she stayed in Paris, studied at the Académie Ranson under Roger Bissière, and lived for a time in the suburb of Le Vésinet. There she saw the avant-garde and for a while experimented with Fauvism and Cubism. Around 1928 she painted “Self-Portrait”, the best known of her works: she showed herself in European dress, with a hairstyle in the fashion of the 1920s, against a dark background, with a tense face.

In 1931 the marriage ended. After her return Na Hyesŏk went on working and held an exhibition in Suwon, and in 1934 she published “A Divorce Testimony” in the magazine Samcheolli, in which she wrote about the inequality of men and women sanctioned by Korean morality. Many considered the text scandalous, and it is generally thought to have undermined her standing. She withdrew from public exhibitions; her late works, for example “Peonies in Front of Hwanyong Hall” (1933), are painted more quickly and freely.

She spent her last years in poverty, in Buddhist monasteries and shelters. She died on 10 December 1948 in a charity hospital in Seoul, and no one claimed her body; the place of her burial is unknown. Of her three hundred oil paintings, about twenty survive. In 2000 the Seoul Arts Center held a retrospective of her work, and in 2019 a Google Doodle marked the anniversary of her birth.