Lot Essay
Fans. Mostly folding fans, some open, some closed, some partly open. A few non-folding fans, paddle-like, with short, fixed handles. Eight fans per panel, for a total of forty-eight on the screen. The title given here is a conventional one, 'one hundred' meaning simply 'a large number of'.
The fans are depicted with such carefully-observed realism and painstaking detail that a viewer feels compelled to reach out and touch them, as if they were actual fans pasted on a screen. They are not; they were drawn with ink and color directly on the paper of each screen panel. Several of the open folding fans have their alternating radiating vanes in two different tones suggesting the effect of light striking the two different angles. This illusion of reality is enhanced by the great care taken in duplicating the appearance of various bamboo, wood, lacquer or metal surfaces on the handles and ribs of the fans.
The most common type of Korean fan is the round, non-folding variety shown at center left in the second panel from the right, its surface gaily ornamented with wedge-shaped segments of colored paper, one red, one yellow, and two blue. Similar fans may be found in the anthropology collections of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and the Peabody Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.
Most of the fans on this screen are the folding type, decorated with paintings and/or calligraphy in Chinese style; paintings within paintings as it were. The folding fan seems to have been invented by the Japanese around the 10th century. Quantities were exported to China, where they proved quite popular. The Chinese immediately began making their own versions. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, China produced a great many folding fans for the European and American export markets, so most Westerners tend to think of folding fans as a Chinese product.
The artist who executed the present screen possessed extraordinary skill and versatility. The landscape or bird-and-flower themes he depicted on the painted fans here are rendered in so many different variations of the Chinese literati style that each seems to be by a different hand or to come from a different period. This painter's ability to understand and convincingly imitate subtle and complex nuances of Chinese-style brushwork is phenomenal; so is his treatment of pictorial space. He must have been one of Korea's top court artists. No less phenomenal is his mastery of several different styles of Chinese calligraphy. Topping these achievements, he has reproduced various different artists' signatures and seals on nearly every painting or calligraphy fan in the screen. It is tempting to speculate that some prominent member of the court nobility or yangban aristocracy who owned a superb collection of Chinese and Korean fans commissioned the present artist to copy them all on a screen.
The fans are depicted with such carefully-observed realism and painstaking detail that a viewer feels compelled to reach out and touch them, as if they were actual fans pasted on a screen. They are not; they were drawn with ink and color directly on the paper of each screen panel. Several of the open folding fans have their alternating radiating vanes in two different tones suggesting the effect of light striking the two different angles. This illusion of reality is enhanced by the great care taken in duplicating the appearance of various bamboo, wood, lacquer or metal surfaces on the handles and ribs of the fans.
The most common type of Korean fan is the round, non-folding variety shown at center left in the second panel from the right, its surface gaily ornamented with wedge-shaped segments of colored paper, one red, one yellow, and two blue. Similar fans may be found in the anthropology collections of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and the Peabody Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.
Most of the fans on this screen are the folding type, decorated with paintings and/or calligraphy in Chinese style; paintings within paintings as it were. The folding fan seems to have been invented by the Japanese around the 10th century. Quantities were exported to China, where they proved quite popular. The Chinese immediately began making their own versions. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, China produced a great many folding fans for the European and American export markets, so most Westerners tend to think of folding fans as a Chinese product.
The artist who executed the present screen possessed extraordinary skill and versatility. The landscape or bird-and-flower themes he depicted on the painted fans here are rendered in so many different variations of the Chinese literati style that each seems to be by a different hand or to come from a different period. This painter's ability to understand and convincingly imitate subtle and complex nuances of Chinese-style brushwork is phenomenal; so is his treatment of pictorial space. He must have been one of Korea's top court artists. No less phenomenal is his mastery of several different styles of Chinese calligraphy. Topping these achievements, he has reproduced various different artists' signatures and seals on nearly every painting or calligraphy fan in the screen. It is tempting to speculate that some prominent member of the court nobility or yangban aristocracy who owned a superb collection of Chinese and Korean fans commissioned the present artist to copy them all on a screen.