Jung Jiyong seems to have agonized over the kind of poetry he wanted to cultivate in colonized Chosun which, having lost its unique Oriental aesthetics amid the influx of Western civilization, was now pursuing a new, Western version of aesthetics.
Thus in 1938 he presented "A Note on Jo Taekwon, A Fresh Oriental Dancer" as if it was meant to reflect his agony. "Poetry exists in the Orient," he said, carefully revealing in it the type of poetry that he had intended to explore with references to Oriental art and poetics.
In the choreography of Jo Taekwon who studied Aesthetic of the Orient and Courtesy of Chosun, Jiyong wanted to find some cues for his poetry. Jo Taekwon was a choreographer who, together with Choe Seunghee, took tutorial lessons from their Japanese teacher Yisiyi Baku (石井漠) and studied in Paris.
He and Jiyong were close friends. Having landed in Paris to major in Western choreography and learn about the West, Jo realized that what he had to do in Paris, the center of Western choreography, was to pursue Oriental traditions.
Jiyong took notice of Oriental aesthetics because he created a method to show the realistic and historical aspects of colonized Chosun in an indirect, circuitous manner. What he created was a form of poetry in which the self and the thing completely merge with one another while the writer remains totally hidden behind his poems. However, he actually exists inside his poetry in a latent form instead of completely disappearing therefrom.
Jiyong borrows, rather than quoting, from Oriental classics in order to broaden his world of art. He was fond of reciting the Shih Ching and T'ang Poem while creating (石井漠) wherein classics and modernism blended.
Yi Baek lived his life as a wanderer under adverse circumstances. And yet he contemplated on the mundane world, wherein he sought beauty and solace while transcending secular interests and gains and losses. One may thus conclude that, though set apart in time and space, Jiyong and Yi Baek pursued a similar kind of poetry in which the self and object fused into one amid the beauty and permanence of nature.