Title of art	동경여전 1학년 작품 Ⅱ/Work II in Tokyo Women's College of Art, Freshman Year			Sector	Korean painting (한국화)
Art specifications	17?20cm			Material technique	Color on papaer
Collection year	1998			Production year	1941
Gallery	Seoul Museum of Art			Artist	Chun Kyung-ja
Description of art	Chun Kyung-ja established a unique style of the traditional chaesaekhwa [oriental color painting]. While employing orthodox methods that also shed the fetters of formal traditionalism, Chun experimented with various configurations to create her own unique painting style. As part of this process, Chun incorporated western oil painting techniques in the use of oriental painting materials, and built up her distinctively stylistic manner in oriental color painting by creating homogenous surfaces through the overlapping of colors. Her paintings are more meaningful as unique creations of an individual artist rather than a continuation of the legacy of the chaesaekhwa style. While Chun’s works were initially more detailed and realistic at the time of her graduation from college, their forms and colors eventually began to symbolically reflect Chun’s own emotions and sentiments starting in the early 1950s. The autobiographical elements became more noticeable in Chun's works from the early 1960s, which featured families and women surrounded in flamboyant flowers. The particular theme of “women and flowers” began to dominate her works, featuring free-spirited composition and fantastical scenes. Starting in the early 1970s, Chun began producing portraits of women in full swing. Her work Gillye Sister in 1973 marked the beginning of her unique style of women portraits, wherein the subjects with their white pupils stare pensively into the air. In the mid-1970s, Chun began to introduce symbolism in her works based on the themes “autobiographic women portraits,” and “transcendental women portraits”, which sprung from a sense of solitude, or han [loosely translatable as deep-seated grief], and her internal world. The most important feature in Chun’s portraits of women is the eyes, through which Chun tried to express her inner world. Starting in the 1980s, most of Chun’s autobiographical portraits began to feature exotic materials and icons recomposed on the paintings to represent Chun's own life. The golden pupils and transcendental images of women based on the ancient Egyptian view on the afterlife continued as the visual formal language in Chun’s paintings into the 1990s. (1941) is an etude created during Chun’s studies at the Women’s School of Fine Arts, Tokyo. Against her father’s wishes to enroll in a medical school after high school, Chun went to Tokyo in 1941 to study art. Instead of majoring in art education, Chun elected to join the department of advanced Japanese paintings because it included more studio practice in its curriculum. During the studio sessions, Chun learned how to observe models, and enjoyed portraying her subjects with realistic detail. In addition to the studio practice on Japanese painting, her first year courses included anatomy, design, instrumental drawing, and art history. At the bottom, it’s written “高日一 千田鏡子,” meaning “Advanced Japanese Art, First Year Student Senda Kyoko (Chun’s Japanese name),” verifying that this was indeed created during Chun’s first year at Joshibi University of Art and Design. The work is a study on Japanese patterns such as child with red hood, camels, palm trees, pyramids, and plum blossoms etched atop gold and silver films. The subjects unveil how Chun had already been interested in exotic scenes and flowers in her youth.
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