Scrolls of Poem-Paintings by Buddhist Monks of the Late Goryeo and Early Joseon : Records of the “Scrolls of Poems” on the Studio Name and Their Significance

Abstract

This article examines written records of the now-lost poem-painting scrolls created by Buddhist monks who were active in the late Goryeo and early Joseon (the fourteenth through fifteenth centuries) in order to reconstruct their artistic exercises and reassess their significance in the history of East Asian art. The literati painters of Yuan China reserved pictorial space in landscape painting for narrative or descriptive purposes. In contrast, the Buddhist monk-painters of the late Goryeo and early Joseon depicted natural features in their landscape paintings, accompanied by poems, as encrypted codes precisely corresponding to the characters of their studio names, or ho 號 (Ch. hao). Yuan’s Shiwu Qinggong 石屋淸珙 (1272~1352), who officially conferred the dharma to Goryeo’s Taego Bou 太古普愚 (1301~1382), proposed “a single thatched hut in the depth of the retreats,” or yi an shenyin 一菴深隱, as exemplary of Chan Buddhist paintings. The written records of the monks’ handscroll paintings suggest that the monks of the late Goryeo and early Joseon painted landscapes by combining the motifs of a thatched hut and of the depth of the retreat with depictions of natural features that signified their studio names. While the monk’s studio name was the central theme of the painting, each character of his name was also rendered pictorially. The records further testify that Goryeo monks played a critical role in introducing to Korea the styles of the Liu Daoquan 劉道權 and Li-Guo 李郭 schools, which gained tremendous traction in the early Joseon art scene, as the literati regarded highly of ink paintings by monks. It has been widely noted that early Joseon paintings contributed to the development of the paintings of a scholar’s studio in Muromachi Japan. The monks’ poempaintings themed on their studio names further attest to the significant impact that early Joseon paintings made over not just the style but also subjects, form, and content of Japanese paintings. Even if many works of premodern Korean painting are now lost, written records about them still survive. Close examinations of such textual sources can help illuminate the historical trajectory of Korean poem-painting scrolls in the context of East Asian art history.