The Landscape Paintings of the Oriental Painting Division in the First Joseon Art Exhibition

The Joseon Art Exhibition’s Oriental Painting Division was a hybrid space of East Asian traditional painting, heavily led by Japanese painting, promoting the public dissemination of painting and its transition into exhibition-based art. This division became a contested ground for the inheritance and modernization of traditional painting and a springboard for a compressed, externally-driven leap into globalized modern art. Landscape painting, a central genre in the transformation of traditional painting over 700 years, accounted for about 40% of submissions, pursuing “refinement” and “reform” through compromise, fusion, and innovation between tradition and modernity, as well as Eastern and Western artistic influences. Rooted in the preferences of painting enthusiasts, artists adopted traditional “pure Nanga” styles that preserved the legacy of the Southern School of Chinese painting, as well as Japanese “old Nanga” styles. At the same time, under the <br/>reclassification as “Oriental painting,” several new styles were diligently explored: realistic landscape painting- a reform of Nanga incorporating realistic techniques; Shinnanga- a modernized interpretation of Nanga; and the New School style of Nihonga, ranging from Moro-style, characterized by the abandonment of traditional line-drawing techniques, to revived Yamato-e or Neoclassicism. Although some artists exhibited works across different styles or incorporated various styles within a single piece, the majority aligned themselves with a specific approach, reflecting trends in modern Japanese painting, which were characterized by conservative (Old School), gradual (Middle School), and progressive (New School) factions. This paper focuses on the stylistic lineage of landscape painting submitted to the first Joseon Art Exhibition in 1922, as it represents the largest body of work produced by Korean and Japanese painters in colonial Joseon. The stylistic genealogy of early landscape painting, which had been the mainstream genre from the beginning, provides a critical starting point for understanding how the dominant Oriental painting styles of the modern era began and evolved.