Orchids in Hanging Basket

Kim Gyu-jin lived during a time of political and social transition—through the last decades of the 500-year-old Joseon dynasty. As an eighteen-year-old, the artist, enamored with old and new technologies, studied ink painting and calligraphy for a decade in China, and later photography, in Japan, in 1907. In 1920 he completed the commission of two monumental polychrome wall paintings of Geumgang, or the Diamond Mountains, for Changdeok Palace.

These delicate orchids with dark sprays of leaves show Kim’s skill as an ink painter. Orchids are a symbol of virtue and, together with plum blossoms, bamboo, and chrysanthemums, are part of a quartet—known as the Four Gentlemen (sagunja)—favored by literati painters. Here, Kim departs from convention by placing the flowers in a basket rather than showing them sprouting among rocks. The basket tilts diagonally as if falling forward, suggesting that these orchids are symbols of virtue not because they thrive in a harsh natural environment but because they withstand the constraints and dangers of a man-made one.