Shin Wi (申緯) bears the courtesy name Hansu (漢叟) and the pen name Jaha (紫霞); his clan seat is Pyongsan (平山). Together with Kim Jeong-hui (金正喜), he was one of the most representative literati painters of the late Joseon period and was acclaimed as a "triple master of poetry, calligraphy, and painting" (詩書畵三絶). Although he did not distinguish himself particularly in official service, he led a relatively smooth life as a man of letters, spending his entire life in the self-cultivated pleasures of poetry, calligraphy, and painting — a fact that can be readily inferred from the considerable number of his ink works that survive to this day. Among the visual arts, he excelled above all in ink bamboo (墨竹), a reputation that spread as far as China. Active during the transitional period between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, he was a disciple of Gang Se-hwang and a senior contemporary of Kim Jeong-hui.

In 1812, at the age of forty-four, he traveled to Beijing as a senior secretary of the diplomatic mission (書狀官), where he met the eminent Qing scholar Weng Fanggang (翁方綱). He subsequently maintained scholarly friendships with Chinese intellectuals including Weng's son Weng Shukun. Among Shin Wi's surviving works, a handful of small landscape paintings modeled after various Chinese masters are extant. The figures he cited in his works include Mi Fu (米芾), Huang Gongwang (黃公望), and Dong Qichang (董其昌). The paired landscape scrolls under discussion are noted as having been modeled respectively after the Qing painters Wang Jian (王鑑) and Yun Shouping (惲壽平). However, as is the case with other works in the imitative (*bang*) tradition of the late and final periods of Joseon, a direct stylistic connection to either master cannot be established.

In any event, the most distinctive stylistic feature of these paintings is their moist and supple brushwork and ink technique — a quality equally evident in his ink bamboo compositions. Another characteristic trait is that the pictorial space is uncluttered and comparatively restrained. Large-format works such as these paired scrolls are exceedingly rare among Shin Wi's known landscapes. Furthermore, the stability and refinement of his brushwork, compositional arrangement, and ink manipulation make these paintings arguably the most outstanding examples of his landscape art known to date.