The Hongdo Kim Code

I will be honest with you — I found Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code a thoroughly enjoying read. A testament to its enduring popularity as pulp fiction, I read the whole thing in one high-adrenaline spurt, turning the pages in relentless pursuit of the forces behind Jacques Saunière’s unorthodox murder. It was only later that I learned the conspiracy theories on which the book was based on were shaky at best, completely fabricated at worst. It was a huge letdown, especially considering the statement at the beginning of the book claiming that the Priory of Sion, the secret organization central to the book’s plot, was absolutely real, having been founded in 1099. (Most scholars agree that the Priory of Sion is in fact a hoax created in 1956 by Pierre Plantard.)

The sadder thing was that I should have learned my lesson back in 2010, which was approximately when my friend and I agreed to research the identity of A Series of Unfortunate Events author Lemony Snicket on Google overnight and both arrived at the conclusion that Snicket was a fabricated persona under which Daniel Handler published his books. The secret society we had agonized over for days and nights, known as V.F.D., did not exist either. My disappointment then was echoed approximately four years later at the hands of Dan Brown, who successfully duped me into thinking the Priory of Sion was real.

All disillusionment aside, the success of both The Da Vinci Code and A Series of Unfortunate Events got me thinking about the common appeal of such works. They deftly straddled the boundary between fact and fiction, possessing a verisimilitude that led readers to care far more about the events in the book that they would have otherwise. While reading The Da Vinci Code, I found myself giving famous works such as the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper a second look, looking for hidden nuances in their brushstrokes of ages past. Perusing through fake newspaper clippings in an effort to unravel the mysteries in A Series of Unfortunate Events fostered in me a great curiosity for investigative journalism, particularly the ultra-intensive kind brought to the public eye by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein through their coverage of Watergate. The Da Vinci Code should by no means be taken as solid history, but its merit in drawing attention to art and history should be acknowledged.

This is what this project aims to do with Hongdo Kim’s artwork. Kim is perhaps the most prominent painter in Korean history. A figure of the Joseon dynasty, he is believed to have lived from 1745 to 1806, but much of his life remains a mystery, leaving room for speculation. Did he really paint all of the works which are attributed to him today? Did he lead a secret life as a pioneer of the ukiyo-e movement? We will also expand our discussion to include other famous Korean painters such as Yoonbok Shin, whose paintings have their own share of conspiracy theories to tell — did he draw himself as a woman, like da Vinci allegedly did when painting the Mona Lisa?

The Hongdo Kim Code will have been regarded as a success if any one of its posts prompted a reader to wager a Google search on Kim, Shin, any of their artwork, or Korean art in general.

We will be back soon with our first post.

— Jungmin Bae, Editor-in-Chief