Title of art	이탈리아 기행/Trip to Italy			Sector	Korean painting (한국화)
Art specifications	90.5?72.5cm			Material technique	Color on paper
Collection year	1998			Production year	1973
Gallery	Seoul Museum of Art			Artist	Chun Kyung-ja
Description of art	Chun Kyung-ja established a unique style of the traditional chaesaekhwa [oriental color painting]. While employing orthodox methods that also shed the fetters of formal traditionalism, Chun experimented with various configurations to create her own unique painting style. As part of this process, Chun incorporated western oil painting techniques in the use of oriental painting materials, and built up her distinctively stylistic manner in oriental color painting by creating homogenous surfaces through the overlapping of colors. Her paintings are more meaningful as unique creations of an individual artist rather than a continuation of the legacy of the chaesaekhwa style. While Chun’s works were initially more detailed and realistic at the time of her graduation from college, their forms and colors eventually began to symbolically reflect Chun’s own emotions and sentiments starting in the early 1950s. The autobiographical elements became more noticeable in Chun's works from the early 1960s, which featured families and women surrounded in flamboyant flowers. The particular theme of “women and flowers” began to dominate her works, featuring free-spirited composition and fantastical scenes. Starting in the early 1970s, Chun began producing portraits of women in full swing. Her work Gillye Sister in 1973 marked the beginning of her unique style of women portraits, wherein the subjects with their white pupils stare pensively into the air. In the mid-1970s, Chun began to introduce symbolism in her works based on the themes “autobiographic women portraits,” and “transcendental women portraits”, which sprung from a sense of solitude, or han [loosely translatable as deep-seated grief], and her internal world. The most important feature in Chun’s portraits of women is the eyes, through which Chun tried to express her inner world. Starting in the 1980s, most of Chun’s autobiographical portraits began to feature exotic materials and icons recomposed on the paintings to represent Chun's own life. The golden pupils and transcendental images of women based on the ancient Egyptian view on the afterlife continued as the visual formal language in Chun’s paintings into the 1990s. It took Chun three years to complete (1973) based on her impressions from Florence. During her trip to Italy in 1970, Chun was immensely moved and shocked by the Renaissance masterpieces in Florence. Her intense recognition of the need to create new art from the context of the traditional served as a turning point in her painting style. Trip to Italy features some of the works that left a deep impression on Chun during her travels. At the center is the catalog of Botticelli, on the right is a postcard featuring Flight into Egypt (1451-52) by Fra Angelico and on the top left is one of Chun’s travel sketches, St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice (1970). Of the works she saw in Florence, Chun was particularly captivated by Botticelli’s Spring (1478). Her selection of Botticelli’s catalog demonstrates the love at first sight she felt when she saw Spring and her admiration for the beauty of the Botticelli piece. The Angelico postcard represents Chun’s ardor for broadening her horizons and visiting Africa. Finally, Chun’s own work featured here is a direct expression of how she felt about her trip to Italy. Key icons such as gloves, manicured hands, playing cards, and wine bottles also make their first appearance in this work, and continue to do so in Chung’s works to come. The cards represent her emotional state, the wine bottle her lonesome travels, and the hands a part of her body. These subjects represent the artist herself. Chun imbued her emotions into flowers, flora and fauna, and specific inorganic objects to give them symbolic meaning. As can be seen, Trip to Italy provided a new turning point in Chun’s painting style in the 1970s.
Address	61, Deoksugung-gil, Jung-gu, Seoul			Source	Seoul Metropolitan Government