A Yangban

This print depicts a yangban, a member of the traditional Korean aristocratic and scholarly class, in period dress. Hasui traveled to Korea (then under Japanese colonial administration) in 1919, producing a series of prints documenting Korean subjects including people, architecture, and landscape. A yangban would be shown in the distinctive white ramie or hemp garments and tall horsehair hat — the gat — associated with the class. Hasui approached the subject with the same compositional care he brought to Japanese subjects, rendering the figure with attention to the texture and drape of traditional costume against a minimal or contextual background. These Korean works form a discrete and historically complex body within Hasui's output, valued both as prints and as documentary records of a culture under colonial transformation, though they inevitably reflect the perspective of a Japanese artist working in an occupied country.