South Korea CHARACTERISTICS OF SOCIETY UNDER THE DYNASTIES
Cultural Expression
Kyongbok Palace, Seoul
Courtesy Oren Hadar
Koreans, like the other East Asian peoples, have a highly
developed aesthetic sense and over the centuries have created a
great number of paintings, sculptures, and handicrafts of
extraordinary beauty. Among the very earliest are the paintings
found on the walls of tombs of the Koguryo Kingdom (located in
what is now North Korea) and around the China-North Korea border
area. These paintings are colorful representations of birds,
animals, and human figures that possess remarkable vitality and
animation. Similar, though less spectacular, tombs are found
around the old capitals of the kingdoms of Paekche and Silla in
present-day South Korea. A number of gold objects, including a
gold crown of great delicacy and sophistication dating from the
Three Kingdoms period, have been found in South Korea.
Buddhism was the dominant artistic influence during the later
Three Kingdoms period and the Silla and Koryo dynasties. Themes
and motifs that had originated in India passed to Korea through
Central Asia and China. A number of bronze images of Buddha and
the Bodhisattvas were made during the sixth, seventh, and eighth
centuries. The images are not mere copies of Indian or north
Chinese models, but possess a distinctly "Korean" spirit that one
critic has described as "as indifference to sophistication and
artificiality and a predisposition toward nature." The striking
stone Buddha found in the Sokkuram Grotto, a cave temple located
near Kyongju in North Kyongsang Province, was carved during the
Silla Dynasty and is considered to be the finest of Korean stone
carvings. During the centuries of Buddhism's ascendancy, a large
number of stone pagodas and temples were built, one of the most
famous being the Pulguksa Temple near Kyongju.
The Koryo Dynasty is best remembered for its celadons, or
bluish-green porcelains, considered by many specialists to be the
best in the world, surpassing even the Chinese porcelains upon
which they were originally modeled. Many have intricate designs
of birds, flowers, and other figures rendered in light and
dark-colored clay on the blue-green background; some are
delicately formed into the shapes of flowers, animals, and
objects. Choson Dynasty pottery tended to be simpler and more
rustic and had a great influence on the development of Japanese
artistic appreciation from the late sixteenth century on. After
the attempted Japanese invasions of Korea in the 1590s, Korean
potters were taken back to Japan.
During the Choson Dynasty, Buddhism was no longer a source of
artistic inspiration. The art, music, and literature of the
yangban were deeply influenced by Chinese models, yet
exhibited a distinctively Korean style. Korean scholar-officials
cultivated their skills in the arts of Confucian culture--Chinese
poetry, calligraphy, and landscape painting. Poetry was
considered to be the most important of these arts; men who lacked
poetic ability could not pass the civil service examinations.
Scholars were expected to refine their skill in using the brush
both in calligraphy, the ornamental writing of Chinese characters
that was considered an art in itself, and in landscape painting,
which borrowed Chinese themes and styles. However, scholarly
calligraphers and landscape painters were considered amateurs.
Professional artists were members of the
chungin (see Glossary)
class and were of low status, not only because their
painting tended to diverge from the style favored by the upper
class but because it was too realistic. Particularly among the
yangban, Chinese dominance of cultural expression was
assured by the fact that Korean intellectual discourse was
largely dependent on Chinese loanwords. Scholars preferred to
write in Chinese rather than in native Korean script.
One uniquely Korean style of painting that developed during
this period was found in the usually anonymous folk-paintings
(minhwa), which depicted the daily life of the common
people and used genuine Korean rather than idealized or Chinese
settings. Other folk paintings had shamanistic themes and
frequently depicted hermits and mountain deities.
A distinctive position in traditional Korean literature is
occupied by a type of poem known as the sijo--a poetic
form that began to develop in the twelfth century. It is composed
of three couplets and characterized by great simplicity and
expressiveness:
My body is mortal, commonly mortal.
My bones end in dust, soul or no soul.
My lord owns my heart, though, and that cannot change.
This poem is by Chong Mong-ju (1337-92), a Koryo Dynasty loyalist
who was assassinated at the foundation of the Yi Dynasty. The
poet refers to his political choice not to side with the new
government.
Many of these poems reveal a sensitivity to the beauties of
nature, delight in life's pleasures, and a tendency toward
philosophical contemplation that together produce a sense of
serenity and, sometimes, loneliness. Frequently the poems reveal
a preoccupation with purity, symbolized by whiteness:
Do not enter, snowy heron, in the valley where the crows are
quarreling.
Such angry crows are envious of your whiteness,
And I fear that they will soil the body you have washed in the
pure stream.
The development of a Korean alphabet (today known as
han'gul), in the fifteenth century gave rise to a
vernacular, or popular, literature. Although the native alphabet
was looked down upon by the yangban elite, historical
works, poetry, travelogues, biographies, and fiction written in a
mixed script of Chinese characters and han'gul were widely
circulated. Some vernacular literature had what could be
interpreted as social protest themes. Probably the earliest of
these was The Tale of Hong Kil-tong by Ho Kyun. The
protagonist, Hong Kil-tong, was the son of a nobleman and his
concubine; his ambition to become a great official was frustrated
because of his mother's lowly background. He became a Robin Hood
figure, stole from the rich to give to the poor, and eventually
left Korea in order to establish a small kingdom in the south.
Other vernacular writers included Kim Man-jung, who wrote The
Nine Cloud Dream, which dealt with Buddhist themes of karma
and destiny, and The Story of Lady Sa. Pak Chi-won's
Tale of a Yangban gave a realistic account of social life
in eighteenth-century Korea. In 1980 Korean scholars discovered a
nineteenth-century vernacular novel that told of the complicated
relationships among members of four yangban and commoner
clans over five generations in a very detailed and realistic
manner. At 235 volumes, this work is one of the longest novels
ever written.
P'ansori combine music and literary expression in
ballad-form stories, which are both recited and sung by a
performer accompanied by a drummer who sets the rhythms--a kind
of "one-man opera" in the words of one observer. P'ansori
usually are inspired by myths or folk tales and have Confucian,
Buddhist, or folkloric themes. In the 1970s and 1980s, dissident
students often drew on the techniques of traditional folk drama
to satirize contemporary politics.
Korean folk tales are closely tied to religious traditions
and usually have shamanistic, Buddhist, or Confucian themes.
While Confucian tales tend to be moralistic and didactic,
Buddhist and shamanistic tales are highly imaginative and
colorful, depicting the relationships among spirits, ghosts,
gods, and men in many different and often humorous ways.
Data as of June 1990
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