Modern Korean Western-style Painting
한국 근대 서양화
The oil painting and other Western painting that Korean painters learned, largely by way of Japan, from the early twentieth century, and the work they made in it; in Korea it is called seoyanghwa, Western painting.
01About
In 1909 Ko Hui-dong entered the Tokyo School of Fine Arts to study Western painting, and returned home on graduating in 1915; he is regarded as Korea's first Western-style painter, though he later went back to ink painting. From 1922 to 1944 the Government-General held the Joseon Art Exhibition every year, with a section for Western painting, and many new painters made their debut there. Most painters of this generation trained in Tokyo: Yoo Youngkuk entered the oil painting course at Bunka Gakuin in 1935, met avant-garde art such as Cubism and Constructivism there, and later turned the mountain into the subject of his abstraction. Others drew on their own traditions: Lee Dai-won carried the methods of embroidery, mother-of-pearl lacquer, and ink brushwork into oil painting. After the Korean War, many painters saw Paris as “the capital of modern art” and moved to France.
02In the gallery
Check the year and where the painter trained on the label, then see whether the oil paint is laid flat, built up, or set down stroke by stroke like a brush in ink.
Wall label terms in Korean
- 서양화
- Western-style painting
- 유화
- Oil painting
- 조선미술전람회(선전)
- Joseon Art Exhibition
- 추상
- Abstraction
03Notes
In this oil painting, what seems learned from the West, and what comes from the painter's own tradition?
Related exhibitions
- 2026 Korean Modern Masters: Yoo Youngkuk – The Mountain Is Within MeSeoul Museum of Art (SeMA), Seosomun Main Building, 1F · May 19 – Oct 25, 2026
- Lee Dai-won: There Is Nothing That Makes You SadMMCA Deoksugung (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art) · Aug 6 – Nov 8, 2026
- Go Hee-dong Art Museum’s 6th Anniversary Exhibition of Its Reopening: “Eternal Evergreen: The Dignity of the Gentleman”Jongno District Go Hee-dong Art Museum · Sep 5, 2025 – Dec 27, 2026
- A Stranger in ParisMMCA Deoksugung (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art) · Dec 17, 2026 – May 9, 2027