Orchids on a Volcano - the elegant resilience of Chusa Kim Jeong-hui.

10/15/2019

❉ Blog number 17 on diagrams in art and culture covers some of the ideas, images and research projects I discovered during a spring-time residency on the island of Jeju in South Korea. The two new drawings I developed following my stay there were on show in a group exhibition at the Chusa Memorial Museum from Oct 15th - Nov 17th, 2019.

figure 1: NASA image of Jeju Island
( United States Geological Survey Landsat data, Robert Simmon, Google Earth, 2000 )

낭떠러지에온갖풀말랐는데
난초는오히려생기가돋아난다
군자는험악한곳에살면서도
보통사람과다르지않은가

On the dark cliff hundreds of weeds are withering,
And yet the orchid bounds with vigor.
The noble person dwells in steep, isolated places.
He is indeed different from normal people.

- Chen Hsien Chang (Ming dynasty)

In the spring of 2019, I travelled to Jeju island, an eye-shaped volcanic landmass staring upwards off the southern coast of the Korean peninsula. I'd been invited by the Korean artist Mikyung Oh and her husband, the sculptor Do il, to take part in a group residency in connection with the Chusa Memorial Museum, during which time the selected artists were asked to respond to the works of the legendary Korean scholar and calligrapher after whom the museum is named (fig. 2).

Mikyung and Do il's main studios are in Yongin city just south of Seoul, but they travel regularly with their daughter Yule to Mikyung's hometown on Jeju to maintain the family tangerine orchard. The residency program is run from Mikyung's family home there, alongside a barn converted by Do il in to studio space.

Once all the artists had arrived at the orchard we were welcomed by a Kayagum concert held beneath the heavy bows of one of Jeju's ancient Hackberry trees. Afterwards, we set about exploring the island and learning more about it's most famous historical resident Chusa Kim Jeong-hui, exiled scholar and man with two hundred names.

Opened in 2010, the Chusa Memorial Museum is situated next to the original site of Chusa's home on Jeju, which has now been rebuilt in traditional materials.
The Museum is mostly subterranean, with three exhibition halls, a lecture theatre and conservation room.
Above ground, the minimalist memorial hall with its single circular window references one of Chusa's most iconic paintings titled 'Sehando', or 'Winter scene' (figs. 2, 3).

figure 2: Chusa Memorial Hall
( designed by Seung Hyo Sang )

figure 3: Chusa Kim Jeong-hui’s masterpiece Sehando (A Winter scene),
1844, National Treasure #180 ( public domain )

figure 4: Portrait of Chusa Kim Jeong-hui
(public domain)

Chusa was 55 when he was banished to Jeju on September the 4th, 1840. The ruler of Korea at the time, King Heon-jong, was young and relatively powerless, and a number of influential aristocratic families took this as their chance to advance their positions within the royal court by any means necessary.

Charges were made against Chusa following his promotion to vice minister of justice and deputy envoy to Qing China, and despite being entirely unfounded, the accusations were serious enough for Chusa to initially be sentenced to death. A friend in government however managed to convince officials to instead send him in exile to remotest 'Daejeong-hyeon', the archaic name for southwest Jeju, where he would spend the next 8 years of his life in productive, scholarly solitude.

Geology and the molten roots of an island

Chusa's journey to Jeju must have been very different to our own. The subtropical island is now Koreas most famous holiday resort, complete with sprawling luxury hotels and Chinese casinos. An incredible 76,460 flights travelled between Seoul and Jeju airport in 2018 alone, making it the single most crowded flight path on earth. (In comparison, just over 14,000 flew between London Heathrow and New York’s JFK).

As you arrive by air the most distinctive feature of the island is Mount Halla or Hallasan, an enormous shield volcano and the highest peak in South Korea. The remainder of the island is relatively flat, which highlights the 300 plus other volcanic cones that protrude abruptly amongst the fields. These surface features connect underground as a colossal volcanic network of structures, a so-called ‘magma plumbing system’ that extends up to 60 km deep (figs. 5,6).

figure 5: Geology of Jeju Island
( Yoon Sun et.al., Korea Rural Community and Agriculture Corporation, 2006, scale 1:150,000. )

Until only fairly recently very little was known about this subterranean system, but an ingenious new technique has allowed researchers to explore the hidden structures that lie beneath the island's surface.

figure 6: Diagrams of Lithospheric Structures Beneath Jeju Island
Image courtesy of Jung-Hun Song (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Between 2013 and 2015, a team of Geologists from Seoul and Busan used 20 seismographic stations across the island to record waves passing through the earth from the 484 different earthquakes that had occurred in neighboring regions during that period.

Earthquake waves are known to travel at different speeds through different types of rock. By carefully comparing the arrival times of the waves at each station against which routes they had taken through the earth, (a process known as 'Teleseismic Traveltime Tomography'), the scientists were able to model the enormous bodies of magma beneath Jeju, giving us our first look at the vast molten roots of the island and a clearer understanding of how these systems develop (fig. 6).

The geology and vegetation of Jeju are in fact so unusual, that large tracts of the island are now protected by law under Unesco World Heritage status. One of the island's major geological features was unwittingly discovered by a farmer installing electricity cables, who watched as one of his posts vanished in to the ground before him. The pole had broken through the roof of a cavernous Lava-tube full of rare rock formations, and large sections of these tunnels are now open to the public, with others being continually discovered thanks to less invasive techniques such as ground penetrating radar.

figure7: Section of a lava tube system in the North East of Jeju island

Biology and the genetic roots the orchid

During his time on Jeju, Chusa wrote letters and poems to friends and students, taught classes at a local school and wandered the island to pick tea leaves and sketch the local orchids. One of the ‘four noble gentlemen’ of traditional Chinese painting, orchids are renowned for their ability to grow and blossoms in barren environments, and scholar-artists used them as a visual metaphor for resilience, nobility and humility, and as a symbol of friendship and loyalty.

Chusa's brush of choice was made of rat’s whiskers, a material which he found combined strength with sensitivity, and also allowed him to abruptly change the direction of his stroke whilst painting. With each new painting he would often coin a new 'Ho' or pen-name when signing the piece, to suggest a particular persona in association with the image.

figure 8: Orchid painting, Chusa
(unknown date, public domain)

Over his life time Chusa created over 200 different pen-names for his calligraphy, poems and paintings, and according to his own accounts, in his 70 years he wore down 10 ink stones and 1,000 brushes whilst developing the distinctive Chusa style or 'Chusache'.

His most famous orchid masterpiece is said to have been made after not having painted a single orchid for 20 years, created in an absent minded moment as a gift for his young servant (figure 8).

It's unlikely that his servant appreciated what he'd been given, but a local artisan certainly knew it's worth and continued to beg and pester Chusa for the scroll until it suddenly one day disappeared.

Later, Chusa wryly added this tale to the painting itself in his unique 'Chusache' script (fig. 8).

Thanks to their ability to migrate and develop to suit different conditions, orchids have evolved in to an extraordinarily diverse family of plants. Their highly specialised roots have allowed them to colonize not only the inhospitable lava rocks and quick draining soils of Jeju, but almost every habitat on Earth, except Antarctica.

Around 10% of all flowering plants species are now known to be orchids, with somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 species and over 70,000 hybrids and cultivars. Scientists are currently in the process of mapping out the extensive evolutionary lineage of orchids and in 2017, a study published in Nature Magazine announced that an international consortium of researchers had sequenced the genome of Apostasia shenzhenica, a primitive 'Grass Orchid' whose appearance is only barely recognisable as an orchid.

By comparing it's genome with known sequences in other species, they were able to estimate the time at which it diverged or 'split off' from other orchids. Their study also gives us a better idea of when the 'Most Recent Common Ancestor' (MRCA) of all orchids existed, now believed to be around 200 million years ago at the dawn of the age of the dinosaurs (figure 9).

figure 9: Phylogenetic tree diagram of MADS-box genes involved in orchid morphological evolution.
Image courtesy of Jie-Yu Wang and Rolf Lohaus (CC BY 4.0)

Critical appreciation of traditional Korean painting often involves an awareness of the negative space or unpainted regions of an art work, and several of Chusa's orchid paintings use the white of the paper at the base of the leaves and stalks to suggest the terrain in which the flower grew (see below).

In developing the two new drawings for the residency on Jeju, I was interested in the notion of absence within an image - what an artist chooses to show and chooses not to, but also in terms of what can be said to lie hidden behind the surface appearance of the things which surround us.

Written within the fabric of nature is evidence of innumerable events that occurred in deep geological and evolutionary time in order for the volcanoes and orchids to exist, and it's only by means of years of collaborative investigation and ingenious new techniques, that we have come to be able to detect and decipher them.

As geologists diagram the molten roots beneath the rock on which Chusa wandered, and geneticists piece together the genetic roots which underlie each of Chusa's orchids, we have come to realise that these structures stretch backwards through space and time in ways that Chusa could never have imagined.

Below are high resolution images of each finished drawing, which can be viewed in detail using the control icons to the right of each image. Beneath these are a collection of Chusa's own orchid paintings, which now comprise a digitized collection available online here as part of Google's Arts and Culture Project.

Tear glands, tear ducts, tear drops
(Lacrimal gland and ducts with Lithospheric anomalies)
Michael Whittle, 2019, Ink pencil and watercolour on paper, 111.2 x 78.9 cm

References:
Jung-Hun Song et.al., 2018, Imaging of Lithospheric Structure Beneath Jeju Volcanic Island by Teleseismic Traveltime Tomography, Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, 10.1029.

Online: https://doi.org/10.1029/2018JB015979

The roots of the Orchid
(Divergent phylogenetic tree with common ancestor and desiccation)
Michel Whittle, 2019, Ink pencil and watercolour on paper, 111.2 x 78.9 cm

References:
Guo-Qiang Zhang et.al., 2017, The Apostasia genome and the evolution of orchids. Nature 549: 379-383

Online: https://rdcu.be/bUj7h

Chusa's Orchids: