Kim Sujang is one of the truly great shijo poets, but very little is known about him. He was born in 1690; his family home was in Chonju; he served for an unspecified period of time as a minor official in the military ministry, a position not held by a yangban. Apart from these few documented facts, we know that he edited Haedong kayo (Songs of the Eastern Sea), the second great shijo anthology, that the process of editing and revising took about thirty years, that he built a villa, called Nogajae, on a mountain in Hwagaedong in Seoul, where he spent an idyllic old age - he lived into his eighties - savoring the pleasures of nature and art in the company of his friends. One hundred and twenty-three of his shijo are extant.
Kim Sujang broke new ground in shijo in terms of theme, language and form. His love poems, in particular, reveal a new complexity of feeling and his sasol shijo show the new somin (common people) influence in the shijo form.