Painters as Envoys: Korean Inspiration in Eighteenth-Century Japanese Nanga

Painters as Envoys: Korean Inspiration in Eighteenth-Century Japanese Nanga. By BURGLIND JUNGMANN. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004. 272 pp. $60.00 (cloth).

Burglind Jungmann must be congratulated for making a key contribution not only to Japanese and Korean art history but also to the whole fascinating subject of cultural relations between Japan and Korea. She sets the stage for personal encounters between Japanese and Korean artists with a detailed, engaging account of Korean embassies to Japan, including the description of the delegation of 1636-37 by a Dutch witness and a painting of a mid-eighteenth-century delegation attributed to a follower of one of the greatest of Nanga artists, Ike Taiga (1723-76). This presentation, taking up all of the first chapter, will be of considerable interest to all historians.

The author's primary concern, however, is to argue that there was an unmistakable Korean influence on Japanese painters (and calligraphers, although this aspect is only touched upon) far greater than anything previously realized. The influence of Chinese painting, both in the form of actual paintings and perhaps more significantly in the form of woodblock prints from painting manuals such as the famous Jiezi yuan huazhuan (Mustard seed Garden Manual of Painting), is of course well known and widely studied. Jungmann wishes to extend the demonstration by Yamanouchi Chozo of the influence on the plum-blossom paintings of Gion Nankai (1676-1751) of Pak...