14 People in the Arts
Minhwa, Painting the Peoples’ Desires By Kang Jennis Hyun-suk
W
hen the new year comes around, we make resolutions hoping for our lives to be happy. Are you still keeping your New Year’s resolutions? Fortunately, you can have a second chance in Korea with the Lunar New Year, which comes in February this year. In Korea, parents and children, husbands and wives, and brothers and sisters kneel and bow to each other while giving mutual words of blessing for the coming year.
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February 2021
In the old days, there was an additional New Year’s custom. People exchanged paintings of happiness with each other. They put the paintings on the walls in their homes or on the doors to bring them good luck for the year. In particular, putting up a painting of a tiger was believed to repel bad energy. These paintings were called sehwa (세화, New Year’s painting). Sehwa is one sub-genre of folk paintings known as minhwa (민화, literally, folk + painting). We still exchange New Year’s calendars with wonderful traditional paintings on them when the New Year comes. I think this is likely a modern-day manifestation of our ancestors exchanging of sehwa.
What Are Minhwa Paintings?
Minhwa are free-style, informal folk paintings resembling the Egyptian murals or the Goguryeo Dynasty (37 B.C. – 668 A.D.) murals. Minhwa contains the essential consciousness and spirit
of nature. Many of them have twodimensional configurations. People enjoyed minhwa throughout their daily lives. On doors, walls, folding screens, ceramics, and even mats, the patterns of minhwa contain the people’s hopes and desires. For example, peaches symbolize immortality, pomegranates and watermelons represent prosperity for one’s offspring, leopards denote bravery, and deer and rocks signify longevity. Different minhwa painting types are named after the symbols they contain. — Hojak-do (호작도, tiger and magpie paintings) These paintings were made in the hope of bringing good fortune in the new year. Korea was a country of tigers. Two-thirds of the land area are mountains, a favorable habitat for tigers. And there were certainly many stories about the Korean tiger. One of them is “Gotgam and the Tiger.” As the story goes, once upon a time, a hungry tiger came down to a village and sat in front of a hut where a baby was crying. The tiger could hear an old lady’s voice from the hut. She told the baby, “Stop crying or the tiger will come and eat you up! The tiger was surprised. “How does she know I am here?” he thought. But the child did not stop crying. The old lady next told the baby to stop crying because Gotgam was coming, and the infant suddenly stopped crying. The tiger’s pride was hurt. “How frightening
Cheakgeori (still-life bookshelf) painting [detail]. (Asian Art Museum, San Francisco) 2021�02��(February).indd 14
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