Kim Hong Do, a Painter of the 18th Century, and His Painting Ssirum

Kim Hong Do, one of the realist painters of the 18th century, decorated the artists' world with a large number of masterpieces, including figure paintings, landscape paintings, flower-tree and bird paintings and other kinds of paintings.

He painted the working people as the masters of his work and actively sustained various techniques, thus showing their creative labor, optimistic lives and the beauty of the simple and sound mental world, and depicting the irrational social reality of the period.

Kim Hong Do’s creative activities can be divided into two stages: the first period of his life, which was until 1795 when he had learnt how to paint and lived in painters. The pictures of this period are characterized by unique screen composition and stroke of the brush, distinct individuality and profound creative attitude.

The painting Ssirum is a realistic work of peculiar realism in the form of a stroke painted by Kim Hong Do in the early period of his creative activities.

The painting shows well the people enjoying the folk holiday doing Ssirum because of the high level of representation with two wrestlers in the center and concentrating the inner world and character of spectators and their eyes in the most exciting moment of Ssirum.

The painting is a work loved by the people because it is based on the principles of comprehension and concentration of Korean painting, such as drawing, color drawing and shading, and the arrangement of characters in a circular structure.