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February 2010

Wednesday February 10, 2010
3:30-5:00PM
Thomson Hall #317

Burglind Jungmann

Center for Korea Studies

Burglind Jungmann earned her doctorate at the Heidelberg University in 1989. After six more years of research in Korea and Japan she gained her second doctorate in 1996. Professor Jungmann currently teaches Korean art history at the University of California in Los Angeles

Discourses about visual culture of the early Chosŏn period (1392-1910) have been dominated by concepts of the literati arts, particularly of landscape painting relating to earlier Chinese masters, the discussion of its styles, iconographies and theories. We have thus acquired a picture of a world dominated by a male elite enjoying poetry, calligraphy, and painting. A good example of a painting representing such a worldview is An Kyŏn’s Dream Journey to the Peach Blossom Land, done in 1447. It was commissioned by a prince, relates to an ancient Chinese poem and to the poet himself who is regarded as the model of the cultured recluse. Its style recalls the dominant landscape idiom of the Northern Song dynasty, the cradle of Neo-Confucianism, and its twenty-one colophons can be read as a “who-is-who” of the fifteenth century Chosŏn political and cultural elite.
The dominance of this male-centered view, its coherence and logic has for a long time prevented us from asking questions such as: Have there been painting genres during roughly the same period that were different in iconography and style? What was the role of women vis-à-vis this male elite, and did their role allow them to engage in the arts as artists or patrons? How did Buddhism, which had dominated Korean culture and politics until the end of the fourteenth century, react to its suppression by Confucian ideologists? An early Chosŏn Buddhist painting, Shakyamuni Triad of 1562, could answer some of these questions by shedding light on a different, female world, that of a queen who sponsored the restoration of monasteries and commissioned hundreds of Buddhist paintings, who had lavish Buddhist ceremonies held and eventually attempted to restore, at least in part, some influence of the Buddhist church over politics.
For the art historian, the contrast between the two worlds is particularly intriguing: not only can one world be described as male and rooted in the Chinese Neo-Confucian literati tradition, and the other as female and devoted to Buddhism, the most striking difference at first glance is the color. Literati landscape paintings are mainly monochrome, Dream Journey to the Peach Blossom Land has only light touches of white and pink for the blossoming trees, while Shakyamuni Triad was done in vivid colors and gold.
By analyzing early Chosŏn literati painting and Buddhist painting and unwrapping the layers of their social significance and cultural backgrounds my paper attempts to shed light on the shaping of male and female roles in early Chosŏn society and on the role that Buddhism played in a Confucian world.