In his painting “Rice Threshing”, Kim Hong-do depicts a group of workers busy at their work of threshing harvested rice, and a gentleman, probably the landowner, comfortably settled on a mat, leaning on a sheaf of rice and smoking a long bamboo pipe. While the painting brings together people from two different rungs of society, the artist has not focused on class struggle or flawed social structures as Western realist painters have done. Kim Hong-do never lost his sense of humor and optimistic world view when observing the daily life of his contemporaries.