Sin Yunbok

Biography

In the leaf “Dano Day” women are washing in a stream, half-naked, one in a bright red skirt swings up on a swing, and from behind a rock two young monks are watching them. The artist’s signature and seal are in place, the date is not: Sin Yunbok did not date his works, and no one has yet managed to arrange his paintings in order.

Of the life itself little is known. He was born in 1758 into a family where painting was a hereditary trade: his father, Sin Hanpyeong, served as a court painter and took part in painting the royal portraits of Yeongjo and Jeongjo; older relatives had been court painters too. His birthplace is unknown. As a child he was called Sin Gagwon, and it is under this name that the seal stands on the “Portrait of a Beauty”; that is how his original name was established. The art name Hyewon he took later. At the royal painting institute, the Tohwaseo, he is thought to have risen to the rank of cheomjeoljesa. Tradition has it that he was expelled from there for the indecency of his subjects. I would insist on neither: there are scholars who doubt that he was ever a member of the Tohwaseo or on close terms with Kim Hongdo at all.

The comparison with Kim Hongdo is unavoidable, and it explains a good deal. The older contemporary painted peasants and craftsmen, with humour. Sin Yunbok chose townspeople, kisaeng, shamanic rites, secret trysts, scenes in village taverns; he coloured brightly, in red, blue and yellow, with pigments brought in by Chinese and Western traders, drew a fine, flowing line and, unusually for Korean painting, filled the whole sheet, leaving no empty space. At the same time he put his own name and seal on most of his works, though he painted what in a Confucian society could easily cost one dearly. No punishment, as far as is known, followed. His ink landscapes he painted in light, transparent strokes close to the manner of Yun Jehong; there are also pictures of animals. He worked on paper and on silk.

After the death of King Jeongjo in 1800 the free spirit of the court was gone, and with it, it is supposed, the painter’s work went into decline.

The last datable work belongs to 1813. When and where he died is unknown; the usual formula is “after 1813”. Thirty of his genre leaves, gathered in the album “Hyewon pungsokhwacheop”, are kept at the Kansong Art Museum in Seoul and in 1970 were listed as National Treasure No. 135 of Korea; the same museum holds the “Portrait of a Beauty” on silk, where the most exact thing in the picture, to my mind, is the folds of the hanbok. In Lee Jung-myung’s novel “Painter of the Wind” and the 2008 television series made from it, and then in the film “Portrait of a Beauty” of the same year, Sin Yunbok is turned into a woman disguised as a man. There are no historical sources to support this.