Artwork · 17th century · Yi Jeong

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Bamboo in the Wind

Yi Jeongearly 17th centuryHanging scroll; ink on silk with gold on colophon115.6 × 53.3 cm

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At a glance

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Stalks of bamboo beside a rock, their leaves tossing in the wind, painted in ink alone on silk.
Yi Jeong, a member of the Korean royal family who signed himself Taneun, made it in the early 1600s.
With only dark ink and pale ink, he separates the near bamboo from the far bamboo and lets you feel the wind.

Reading the picture

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Look behind the black bamboo. There is a second, ghostly layer of gray stalks and leaves. Yi Jeong mixed a lot of water into his ink for these. Dark leaves seem close to us and pale leaves seem farther back, so the grove suddenly has depth.
Zoom in on the branch reaching out to the right. Its leaves are sharp as knife tips, and they all swing to one side. Each leaf is a single stroke: the brush presses down, then lifts away. That is why every leaf is thick at its base and fine at its point.
Now the rock at the bottom. It is one solid mass of ink, laid on with a broad brush. Next to the thin, bending bamboo, Yi Jeong put something heavy that cannot move. The two together keep the picture in balance.
Check the upper left corner of the painting. Two characters, 灘隱, sit above a red seal. They read Taneun, the artist's pen name. It is his name tag, left inside the picture.
Above the painting, two strips of silk were added later. The top one is blue, with large gold characters, and the first two on the right read Seokyang. As a royal, Yi Jeong held the title Prince Seokyang. Below it, another writer added lines in brush and ink.

When it was painted

In 1592, Japanese armies invaded Korea. Yi Jeong, a great-great-grandson of King Sejong and already known for painting bamboo, could not stay clear of the war. A Japanese sword struck his right arm and badly wounded it.

He did not put down his brush. Two years later, in the winter of 1594, in the town of Gongju, he finished an album called Samcheongcheop. Its bamboo, plum blossoms, and orchids are painted in gold on black silk. Today the album belongs to the Kansong Art Museum in Seoul, and Korea has designated it a national Treasure.

The album had a rough life of its own. It was partly burned during the Manchu invasion of 1636. In 1935 the collector Jeon Hyeong-pil, founder of the Kansong collection, bought it. Both the painter and his album came through war.

This Bamboo in the Wind dates to the early 1600s, after the fighting had ended. Yi Jeong painted wind-tossed bamboo more than once. Another of his wind-blown bamboo paintings, now in the Kansong collection, is printed on the back of Korea's 50,000-won bill, first issued in 2009, alongside a plum blossom painting by Eo Mong-ryong.

This scroll made a longer journey. The American collector Mary Griggs Burke spent her life gathering East Asian art, mostly Japanese, and Korean paintings were part of it. In 2015 the Mary and Jackson Burke Foundation gave her collection to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and this scroll came to New York with it.

Look again at the leaves all swinging one way. They were painted by a man who picked up his brush again after a sword wound. Bamboo that bends in the wind but does not snap starts to look a little like him.

The painter

Yi Jeong

1541–1626

All paintings by Yi Jeong →

Bamboo in the Wind

Questions to think about

Look for itWhere do the pale gray leaves in the back cross behind the dark leaves in front?
Why?Why do you think Yi Jeong chose bamboo bending in the wind instead of bamboo standing straight and still?
What about you?Like bamboo that sways but does not break, what is something in your life right now that shakes you but that you are still holding on to?

Same period