Chun Kyung-ja lived like flame

Cover of “Brilliant Solitude, Aesthetics of Sorrow”

Chun Kyung-ja

By Kwon Mee-yoo

Chun Kyung-ja (1924-2015) was one of the most prominent female painters in Korean modern art history. She lived a life full of ups and downs, personally and artistically.

"Brilliant Solitude, Aesthetics of Sorrow" (translated title), a critical biography of Chun published by Misul Munhwa, delves into the life of an artist who lived like a flame.

Author Choi Kwang-jin is an art critic and former curator of the Ho-Am Art Museum who organized a major retrospective of Chun in 1995. Since then, Choi has researched Chun thoroughly, becoming one of the experts on the artist.

Chun's life was not smooth. Born to a conservative family in Goheung, South Jeolla Province, she went to Tokyo to study art despite her father's opposition. She suffered poverty as her family collapsed during the Japanese occupation of Korea (1910-45) and the Korean War (1950-53).

Her first marriage, to Lee Chul-sik, ended in a few years, leaving her with two children. After that she fell in love with Kim Nam-jung, who was married, and had two more children.

Nevertheless, Chun was a happy artist, as she sublimated her strange fate into art.

One of her favorite subjects was snakes, and Chun's snake paintings gave her many breakthroughs. Her self-portrait "Page 22 in My Sorrowful Legend" (1977) also has a snake on the woman's head.

"Amid a series of misfortunes, Chun painted the snake as if clutching a straw. She dramatically contrasted her sorrow and fantasy," Choi writes in the biography.

Choi also elaborates on how Chun is different from Western artists.

"Some people say Chun studied the styles of Western painters such as Marc Chagall, Paul Gauguin, Henri Rousseau or Frida Kahlo, combining their characteristics. However, from an aesthetic point of view, Chagall's fantastic style and Gauguin and Rousseau's primitive styles do not reflect existential insecurity and loneliness. Kahlo's works reflect her unfortunate existential agony, but lack fantasy and romance to transcend it," Choi writes.

"In Chun's works, her distressing existence and fantastic romance co-exist and the conflict is dissolved through existential romanticism, stemming from 'han,' or the Korean sentiment of sorrow."

'Beautiful Woman' controversy

One of the reasons Chun is still the talk of the town after living overseas for a long time and unexpected death last year lies in her painting "Beautiful Woman," in the collection of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA).

Choi, as an expert of Chun's artistic world, tries to appraise the painting in an aesthetic way.

He analyzes the painting in 11 ways and concludes the "Beautiful Woman" is a forgery, citing its weak colors, crude flowers, shape of eyes and fine paint particles.