Shin Saimdang

Two pictures, more than 400 years apart.

The first was never photographed, because in those days no one knew how to take a photograph. But it was written down clearly enough to be seen in the mind. A wooden house stands in Gangneung, a city right on the east coast. Around the house grows a kind of bamboo with black stems, each no thicker than a finger. The stems are so dark that the house took its name from their color. Ojukheon means the house of black bamboo. Inside, a girl of seven bends over a painting that is not her own. She is not admiring it. She is copying it, one stroke at a time.

The second picture can be taken today, anywhere in South Korea. A child stands by a checkout counter, holding the country's highest-value banknote, a yellowish-brown note. On that note is the face of a woman in a hanbok, the traditional Korean dress. Right beside her face is a bunch of grapes painted in ink.

The girl of seven and the woman on the banknote are the same person.

Her name was Shin Saimdang. She was born in 1504 and died in 1551. She lived her whole life under the Joseon dynasty, which ruled Korea for about five centuries from 1392.

The painting the girl of seven sat copying was a landscape in the manner of An Gyeon, a great master of that time. Her own son, once he was grown, described it in an essay about his mother. From the age of seven, he recorded, she painted landscapes after An Gyeon and painted grapes in ink.

Copying a good master was how people of the past learned their craft. What stands out is what came after.

She did not stop at painting misty mountains, trying to match someone else's hand. She bent lower.

What she chose to paint was the grass at the foot of the wall and the garden just behind the house. A watermelon lying on the ground. A glossy dark eggplant. A climbing cucumber vine. Red celosia, pinks, bellflowers, balsam, daylilies. And among those very ordinary plants were tiny creatures: a beetle, a grasshopper, an ant, a moth, a dragonfly, a bee, now and then a frog sitting in wait.

That kind of painting is called chochungdo, which means pictures of grass and insects. She brought those humble things into the middle of the paper. She gave them the place of honor in the painting, instead of tucking them away in some corner. Of everything she left behind, chochungdo is what her name is most closely tied to.

She painted them with unusual care. In some works she laid color straight onto paper of a deep indigo, without drawing a single outline, and simply built up the forms. People of her time praised her flowers and leaves as detailed almost to perfection. That very care made the butterflies and insects in her paintings seem even more alive, as if they were moving.

People also passed along a small story about her paintings. Once, the story goes, a chicken walked past one of them. It saw the insects on the paper, took them for real ones, and pecked at them. Whether that really happened, no one can say for sure. But people have told it for hundreds of years, and stories like that are only told about paintings that look real enough.

The house of black bamboo still stands in its old place. Ojukheon in Gangneung was listed as Treasure number 165 in 1963. It is one of the oldest wooden houses of its kind still standing in South Korea. She was born in that house. Later her son was born in the very same house.

That son was named Yi I, and later generations came to know him by his pen name, Yulgok. He grew up to become a Confucian scholar of the Joseon era.

Now back to the banknote, because the best part is here.

On June 23, 2009, the Bank of Korea issued the 50,000 won note, the highest-value note in the country. It carries a portrait of Shin Saimdang. It was the first time a Korean banknote had carried the portrait of a named woman from history. Next to her face is the bunch of ink grapes she painted with her own hand. Beside it is an embroidered screen, stitched after her paintings of grass and insects.

But three years earlier, on January 2, 2006, another note had come out in a new design. It was the 5,000 won note. Its front shows her son, Yulgok. Right behind him stands that same house in Gangneung, with clumps of black bamboo growing by the veranda.

Then turn the 5,000 won note over.

On the back are a watermelon and a few celosia flowers. A painting by his mother.

So in South Korea today, a child holding those two banknotes is holding a mother and her son. The mother is on one note, the son on the other, and the mother's paintings are on both. She does not stand back behind her son. The two of them are remembered side by side, each for their own work.

Not many of her paintings survive. About 40 of her works remain, most of them colored paintings of grass and insects. Many take the form of folding screens or albums of eight to ten scenes, each scene showing one plant and one creature. The National Museum of Korea holds an eight-panel folding screen thought to be hers. One of its panels shows a watermelon, a few mice and a few butterflies. Later generations even used her paintings as patterns for embroidery. They carried those grasses and insects from paper into thread, and from thread onto silk.

Now lay the two pictures one on top of the other.

On one side is the girl of seven, bending over a painting on the floor. She is in a house where, all year round, the black bamboo rustles together whenever the wind comes up from the sea. On the other side is a child of today at a checkout counter, holding a banknote with that girl's face on it.

In Gangneung the house still stands, and so does the black bamboo. In that small yard, anyone who bends down to look at the grass along the foot of the wall will find something there. There will be ants crawling in a line, perhaps a grasshopper, perhaps a beetle clinging to a blade of grass and not bothering to move.

Five hundred years ago, someone sat down and looked at exactly those things for a long time. Then she painted them so carefully that today they sit in the wallets of a whole country.