歳寒図

Kim Jeong-hui was one of the most admired scholars and calligraphers of his age when politics ruined him and he was banished to Jeju Island, far off Korea's southern coast, penned inside a thorn-hedged hut. He made this spare ink drawing there in 1844, his fourth year in exile. A plain house, a few pines and cypresses, almost nothing else, drawn with the dry restraint of a man who had lost everything but his brush. It was a gift for a former student, Yi Sang-jeok, an interpreter who kept sending him rare books from China when almost everyone else had drifted away. The idea behind it comes from Confucius, that only when the cold comes do you notice the pine is the last tree to keep its leaves. In the empty space beside the picture Kim wrote out what that loyalty had meant to him.