Jingyeong Sansuhwa
Jingyeong Sansuhwa — true-view landscape painting — represents one of the most significant and culturally independent developments in the entire history of Korean art, a movement that emerged in the early eighteenth century during the reign of King Yeongjo as a deliberate and self-conscious departure from the centuries-long Korean practice of painting idealized Chinese landscape subjects in the Chinese manner, replacing imaginary or conventionalized scenery with the direct observation and faithful depiction of actual Korean mountains, rivers, and topographical features — an assertion, in visual form, of the particular beauty and cultural significance of the Korean peninsula itself. The movement's founding figure and supreme practitioner was Jeong Seon, known by his artistic name Gyeomjae, whose panoramic depictions of the Geumgang Mountains — a range of extraordinary rocky peaks in what is now North Korea, long regarded as the most scenically magnificent landscape in the Korean world — combined the ink wash techniques of the Chinese literati tradition with a bold, distinctive brushwork of his own invention, using sharp vertical strokes to convey the characteristic granite peaks of Korean geology in a way that felt simultaneously rooted in the East Asian landscape painting tradition and unmistakably responsive to a specific, observed place. Jingyeong Sansuhwa was not merely an aesthetic development but a cultural and philosophical one, emerging alongside the broader intellectual movement of Silhak — practical learning — that sought to redirect Korean scholarly attention from the exclusive study of Chinese classical texts toward the direct investigation of Korean history, geography, and culture, the landscape painters and the Silhak scholars sharing a conviction that the particular, the local, and the empirically observed deserved the same dignity and attention that had previously been reserved for Chinese models and precedents.