The sentence that first caught my eye on the wall of Gallery 202-1 is in white letters on dark plaster. 글씨와 그림은 하나이다. Writing and painting are one. The wall attributes it to the fifteenth-century writer Seo Geojeong. There is no English on this wall.

I have met the sentence before, in labels and catalogue essays about East Asian painting, and I have never been sure what it means. It could be a technical claim, that the brush moves through a rock the way it moves through a character and that the two share their strokes, or it could be an ideal, a statement about what a cultivated person’s hand should be able to do.

I asked a curator of this gallery a question on a Wednesday evening in September, after her talk had ended and most of the group had gone. Foreigners, or even someone like me who cannot read Chinese characters. How are people like that supposed to look at a work like this?

I am Korean. I can read the Korean labels in this gallery. In the works themselves I recognise some characters, the basic ones, but that is a long way from reading a sentence in someone’s handwriting. That does not put me in quite the same position as a visitor who reads no Korean.

An orchid, September 2

I went first on September 2, which turned out to matter, because the painting I went for came down eleven days later. It is Kim Jeonghui’s Orchid (불이선란도), a sheet of paper on which a single orchid leans across the picture on a diagonal, its leaves pale and dry, one flower where the leaves cross, and around it, filling every part of the paper the plant does not use, writing. Columns of it, in several sizes, and red seals.

I did not read the label. I had seen the painting before, in Jeju in 2022, where the museum’s text asked me to enjoy the balance between the writing and the picture, and I wrote that down in a blog post and moved on. This time I stood in front of it and thought something I had not expected. Wouldn’t this have been a masterpiece for the ages without all that writing? The orchid holds its place among the characters, and that is where its force comes from, a faint thing standing in a crowd. I still wanted the crowd gone.

Two earlier rooms

I had been in this position before. In 2022, at the National Hangeul Museum, I saw an exhibition of naebang gasa, long verse written by women in the Korean alphabet, on strips of paper that ran the length of a display case. It was Hangeul, my own script, and I struggled to read it. The cursive hands and dialect made it difficult, and the museum supplied modern Korean readings so that people like me could follow.

I wrote at the time that a non-specialist should spare themselves the trouble of deciphering the originals; it was better for one’s health to look at the shape of the writing. But through the modern Korean readings, I had spent a long time following what the women had written. There were mothers writing to daughters about to marry, and accounts of love, loneliness and longing. I wrote that I had been drawn into their lives. The long paper and the flowing script had kept my attention, with the help of words I could read.

That year I also flew to Jeju for a day to see Sehando, the winter landscape Kim painted in exile, with the later inscriptions that extend its scroll to some fifteen metres. I read those inscriptions by moving between the scroll and the Korean explanations printed above it, and I noted that not everything had been translated. On my own I read only the title at the head of the scroll, Wandang Sehando, in characters large enough to guess. The story of Kim and the disciple who stood by him absorbed me. I tried to imagine being either of them, and what each had meant to the other. The explanations had given me plenty to care about in both rooms. I had much less to say about the handwriting itself.

The couplet

The second visit was for the curator’s talk, and the work I stood at longest afterward was a pair of hanging scrolls in running script, seven characters each, on pink paper flecked with gold. The label calls them a masterpiece written at a temple, dates them to 1856, the last year of Kim’s life, and says he wrote them for a disciple from his years of exile in Bukcheong. I looked before I read any of that. I saw that the writing was not ordinary. I cannot put it more precisely than that, and I have tried.

The curator answered with the scrolls behind her. Her advice was to concentrate on the rhythm of the characters. The meaning was one way in and not the only one; I could look at each character as an image and see what it did. I went back to look.

Beside the scrolls, the museum has printed each of the fourteen characters on the wall with its Korean pronunciation and a translation, so that the two lines can be followed one character at a time. A coral brush stand holding a peerless brush, and a jade-green vase in which the finest flower blooms. This reading is in Korean only.

Among the fourteen were a few characters I knew, in print at least. I tried three: 筆, brush; 名, name; 花, flower. I found 筆 fourth from the top on the right-hand scroll and held it against the 筆 I know, the printed one, the one I could write out myself. The horizontal strokes are simplified, and the vertical stroke through the centre is made very thick. It looks nothing like the printed character I remember learning. Ah, it is different. So this is how he wrote it.

I did the same with 名 and 花. I am not able to say what the differences amount to, whether they are the rhythm the curator meant, or what a specialist sees when the label calls this late hand free. I still do not know what makes these scrolls a masterpiece.

The inscription on the orchid

At home I went through the photographs from September 2. Beside the orchid the museum had put the inscriptions into Korean on the wall, keyed to where each one sits on the paper, and I had walked past all of it. The passage at the right, halfway down, says that he painted the orchid using the brush methods of several forms of calligraphy, including cursive and clerical script, and asks how the people of the world could understand it, or like it.

The painter says the orchid is written, and I had stood in front of it wanting the writing gone. He is talking about how he made the orchid itself. I still cannot trace the connection he describes from the words to the painted leaves. The sentence at the entrance also describes what I see when I cannot read the words. For us, writing is no different from a picture.

One character

At the couplet, though, I had something specific to look at. Once I knew what the lines said, I could return to the fourth character and compare the form I knew with the one in front of me. I could point to the strokes that had changed. That gave me a reason to stay with the scrolls after reading the explanation.

I can show someone else where I looked and what I noticed. The printed form of 筆 is the one on this page; Kim’s is fourth from the top on the right-hand scroll.

Writing and painting are one. I have no better idea now of what Seo Geojeong meant by it than I had at the wall. But at that one character I was reading and looking at the same time, and there the sentence on the wall was true.

Visiting

Kim Jeonghui and His Companions runs from August 11 to November 22, 2026, in Gallery 202-1, on the second floor of the National Museum of Korea. Admission is free. The orchid was displayed only until September 13. The couplet was in the bay marked “Seasonal Highlights” when I visited; its label listed the same display dates as the exhibition.

The museum is open until 9 p.m. on Wednesdays and Saturdays. See the official exhibition page and museum website for current visitor information and programmes.