Joseon painting: Travelers among Streams and Mountains 潮鮮畫, 溪山行陸旅圖

In the early Joseon period in Korea, professional court (also known as academic) artists adopted and assimilated Chinese models from the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127), foremost among these the landscape paintings of the famous Guo Xi (circa 1023–circa 1085). Employed by the Royal Bureau of Painting in the capital city of Seoul, these artists carried out this cultural transmission either directly through treasured Guo Xi originals or through later Yuan and early Ming dynasty Chinese works based on the style of this acclaimed Song master. Their preferred subject, established and popularized by Guo Xi, is the monumental landscape. In this large, unsigned monochrome ink painting on silk, centralized, billowing mountain shapes—a defining feature of Guo Xi landscapes—dominate the composition. Below, a scholar riding a donkey with attendant figure crosses an earthen bank that leads by way of a rocky ledge to a high mountain range in the distance. The donkey-rider was a popular literary subject in classical Chinese writings, and Ming dynasty painters in China were the first to graft it onto the Guo Xi landscape tradition. However much the painting is indebted to past and recent Chinese models, one 16th-century Korean stylistic innovation appears in the simplification of descriptive details, most noticeably in the stark mountain peaks formed by parallel bands of dark ink strokes superimposed over light, ink-washed grounds.