The East Sea

Jung Do-jun creates works that are solidly rooted in the Chinese calligraphic tradition, but he simultaneously employs innovative devices that firmly set his calligraphies apart from the past. He uses the vernacular Korean hangeul script rather than the classical Chinese characters favored by many modern and contemporary Korean calligraphers. Jung then teases out the expressive qualities of the Korean glyphs by writing them in an archaizing form derived from ancient Chinese inscriptions in bronze and stone. In this work, he also places the main inscription above one of his own pale green rubbings of a prehistoric Korean stone carvings from around 1000 B.C.E. featuring abstracted figure and animal motifs, a work the artist had made years earlier. The poem in the upper half of the scroll reads:

The East Sea is where the sun rises, like a ball of fire emerging from the water. As it comes forth, the veil of darkness is pulled back, and the land of the peninsula is glorified by the ray of light.

The original petroglyph from which the rubbing is made is found on a mountainside near an ancient capital city, itself located not far from the southwestern coast of the Korean peninsula where the dawn first illuminates the country. Verse and image—united in a single work— symbolically praise the distant origins of Korea as a country and the nation’s daily renewal.