Korean art
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- Korea
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Korean art, the painting, calligraphy, pottery, sculpture, lacquerware, and other fine or decorative visual arts produced by the peoples of Korea over the centuries. (Although Korean architecture is touched on here, it is also the subject of a separate article.)
General characteristics
The art produced by peoples living in the peninsula of Korea has traditionally shared aesthetic concepts, motifs, techniques, and forms with the art of China and Japan. Yet it has developed a distinctive style of its own. The beauty of Korean art and the strength of its artists lay in simplicity, spontaneity, and a feeling of harmony with nature.
The basic trend of Korean art through the ages has been naturalistic, a characteristic already evident as early as the Three Kingdoms period (c. 57 bce–668 ce) but fully established by the Unified, or Great, Silla (Korean: Shinla) period (668–935). The traditional attitude of accepting nature as it is resulted in a highly developed appreciation for the simple and unadorned. Korean artists, for example, favoured the unadorned beauty of raw materials, such as the natural patterns of wood grains. The Korean potter was characteristically unconcerned about mechanical perfection of his surfaces, curves, or shapes. His concern was to bring out the inherent or natural characteristics of his materials and the medium. Potters, therefore, were able to work unselfconsciously and naturally, producing wares of engaging simplicity and artistic distinctiveness.
Simplicity was applied not only to economy of shape but also to the use of decorative motifs and devices. The intervention of the human hand is restricted to a minimum in Korean art. A single stem of a flower, for instance, may be drawn in a subtle shade of blue on the side of a white porcelain vase or bottle, but never merely from a desire to fill an empty space. The effect is rather to enlarge the white background.
The avoidance of extremes is another characteristic tradition in Korean art. Extreme straightness of line was disliked as much as extreme curvilinearism. The straight bold contour of a Song dynasty (960–1279) Chinese bowl becomes a graceful, modest curve in a Korean bowl of the Koryŏ period (918–1392). The sharply curving Chinese roof is modified in Korean architecture into a gently sloping roof. Sharp angles, strong lines, steep planes, and garish colours are all avoided. The overall effect of a piece of Korean art is generally gentle and mellow. It is an art of fluent lines. What is most striking is not the rhythm so much as the quiet inner harmony.
Stylistic and historical development
The formative period
Both archaeological and linguistic evidence indicates that the Korean people originally spread into the Korean peninsula from Siberia by way of Manchuria. Prehistoric sites dating from the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods are found throughout the peninsula.
Sporadic Chinese influence on Korean culture began in the late Neolithic Period, but the influence intensified with the establishment in 108 bce of colonies of the Han empire in northwestern Korea. The best known of these was Nangnang (Chinese: Lelang), near P’yŏngyang. From this Chinese centre of culture, iron smelting and advanced techniques of pottery making, such as the use of a potter’s wheel and closed kiln, spread across the peninsula.
The earliest Neolithic potteries, produced in the 6th millennium bce, are flat-bottomed wares decorated with raised horizontal lines, a zigzag pattern around the rim, or horizontal rows of impressed dots or fingernail marks. In the 5th millennium bce the latter type evolved into what is known as comb-pattern pottery, which characteristically features a pointed or rounded bottom and overall geometric patterns of herringbone, meander, and concentric semicircles, produced by incised, impressed, or dragged dots and short lines. The linear, abstract tendency of these Neolithic potteries basically falls in the tradition of prehistoric Siberian art.
In the ensuing Bronze Age (c. 1000–300 bce) and Early Iron Age (c. 300–1 bce) more types of pottery of improved quality appeared. Painted pieces derived from Chinese painted pottery were found in northern Korea, while wares devoid of surface decoration were used in other areas of the peninsula. Clay, bone, or stone figurines of seated or standing shamanistic deities were produced at such northeastern sites as Musan and Kulp’o-ri, as were small clay pigs used as charms to ensure fertility and fortune. The pigs are realistically rendered, and some even have tiny holes that were used to hold real pig hairs.
It was also during this time that bronze- and iron-working centres were established in Korea. Bronze daggers, mirrors, and perforated pole finials, all ultimately of Siberian origin, were cast. The daggers are of the type widely used by the Scythian peoples of the Eurasian steppe. The mirrors were also of a non-Chinese type, with twin knobs placed a little off centre against a tightly composed, geometric design made up of finely hatched triangles. The hatched-triangle motif was widely diffused over the vast Eurasian continent all the way from Hallstatt in Austria to Minusinsk in the upper Yenisey River valley of Siberia. The design was apparently an innovation from the Huai-style mirrors of pre-Han China.
More evidence of the Siberian art tradition in prehistoric Korea can be seen in a rock-cut drawing discovered in 1970 at Pan’gudae, near the southeastern coast of South Korea. Pecked line drawings and silhouettes of animals, including whales, dolphins, tigers, wolves, and deer, are depicted on a large (8 by 2 metres), smooth vertical surface of the rock. Some of the animals have a “life line” drawn from the mouth to the anus in the so-called X-ray style of Siberian rock art. A shaman, hunters, and a fisherman are also depicted.