Character painting consists of mixture of chinese characters and the pictures that signify the letters. Character painting is one genre of folk paintings and HYOJEDO belongs to the character painting. The eight letters and their implications in HYOJED...
Character painting consists of mixture of chinese characters and the pictures that signify the letters. Character painting is one genre of folk paintings and HYOJEDO belongs to the character painting. The eight letters and their implications in HYOJEDO are based on the sacred books and other documentary records. Paintings of characters (MOONJADO) was popular in Korea, China and Japan from 17th to 19th century. While paintings of characters for lucky physiognomy (KILSANG-MOONJADO) and paintings of characters for playing (YOUHEE-MOONJADO) represent China and Japan respectively, paintings of characters of Korea is a unique type of letter painting that advocates confucian ideology and ethics.
Based on historical documents of art, I tried to clarify definition, origin, types, and forms of the three countries' character paining. Also, I elucidated the relationships among the three character painting, the circulation of art works, and the usage of the works. I exerted myself to unveil aesthetic consciousness of late Choson Dynasty affected by social classification and to deal with implicational change, societal background, and characteristics of HYOJEDO.
HYOJEDO has three sequential periods. In the first period, the paintings looked refined and saved the letter's center empty for painting inside it. From the objects and detailed drawing, we can assume both that the artists in the period were painters and that the painting symbolizes nobles' taste. Relying upon these characteristics, I have researched in the paper whether nobles played a role in importing and promoting chinese paintings of characters in Korea.
In the second period, the painting has highly diversified characteristics mainly due to newly born social class. With this frame, the paintings in the second period are mixed with many folk paintings such as landscape paintings, a painting of animals, a painting of flowers-and-birds, a painting of books.
The last period are explained with its building-decoration-patterns and the leather brush. Formalized subjects of paintings were disappeared in this period. The development of being diagrammatic and abstraction was accelerated; mixture with other folk paintings was disappeared; and paintings became smaller than those of previous period in their size. This painting of characters followed the footstep of leather-brush-painting when it comes to its progress, and finally dissipated. When HYOJEDO was created could not be found, so I compared the history of HYOJEDO with a painting of books of which the origin can be traced and tried to establish a probable date of creation of HYOJEDO.
I strongly believe that research on HYOJEDO will, to a great extent, contribute to unearth the life and hope of the middle class, rather than those of nobles, and to illustrate the cultural uniqueness and creativity of the middle class.