The Sacred Past and the Celebrated Present: Chinese Figural Subjects in the Commemorative Court Painting of the Chosŏn Dynasty in Korea
The Banquet of Xiwangmu, the Queen Mother of the West, at the Turquoise Pond, eight-panel folding screen, ink, color, and gold on silk, 120.3 × 407.0 cm, Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Yoonjung Seo is an art historian specializing in Korean art. She received her PhD recently in Art History from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her dissertation examines the ways in which meaning is constructed, modified, and reinstated both in textual and visual forms, and what may happen when themes from a literary text are adapted to painting and/or move across time and cultures. This inquiry further opens onto key cultural issues such as how Chinese antiquity has been appropriated by posterity in East Asia for self-fashioning and the celebration of contemporary events. She has worked as a teaching fellow at Seoul National University and at UCLA while pursing her MA and PhD degrees. During her research in Korea, she participated in three important exhibitions of Chosŏn court art. In 2012 she made contributions to an exhibition project of 17th-century Chinese painting at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in California. During her Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices fellowship, she will focus on the role of women as agent of art, the socio-political significance of commemorative painting in the Chosŏn dynasty, and the circulation of knowledge through visual-textual sources in East Asian culture.
The Sacred Past and the Celebrated Present: Chinese Figural Subjects in the Commemorative Court Painting of the Chosŏn dynasty in Korea
Yoonjung Seo intends to rework and expand her dissertation into a book manuscript and conduct a research project that results in a publishable journal article. The book delves into the complexity of transculturalism as embodied in Chosŏn court art during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and discusses how Chinese historical figures and China’s cultural legacy were represented to satisfy the socio-political demands and local artistic conventions of Korea. The research project explores the significance of commemorative court paintings, the text-image relations, and the role of gender in production and consumption of art in eighteenth-Chosŏn society. Having identified the ink-rubbing version of drawings and illustrations of vernacular novels imported from China into Korea as possible sources of certain pictorial representations appearing in the Chosŏn screens, she investigates the origin, evolution, dissemination, and modification of a specific theme in terms of style, iconography, symbolic meaning, and socio-political connotation.
