Lot Essay
The ten auspicious symbols are found in the land of Immortals associated with the Taoist immortality cult that developed in China during the Han dynasty. The particular grouping of these ten symbols in one painting is apparently unique to Korea. Because of their magical potency, the emblems of long life were immensely popular in all strata of Korean society during the Choson dynasty and they appear in most of the decorative arts of that period.
The ten symbols usually depicted in a Shipjangsaeng screen are the sun, clouds, water, rocks, deer, cranes, tortoises, pine trees, bamboo and pulloch'o, the mythical sacred fungus. On this screen, which is rather unusual, there are no cranes and no tortoises but 74 deer (stags, does, and fawns) crowd the foreground and frolic out into the waves. According to the mythology of Chinese Taoism, exported to Korea in early times, deer were the messengers and companions of the Immortals.
The sun, clouds, water and rocks were conventionally perceived as eternal.
Pine trees stay green through the winter. Resisting harsh wind, ice and snow, they sometimes live for hundreds of years. Bamboo also remains green in winter; it bows before the wind but never breaks.
The red fiddleheads rising on short stalks just above the ground in almost every panel of the present screen represent pulloch'o, the mythical sacred fungus of Taoism. Pulloch'o is a sort of magic mushroom said to bestow immortality on those who eat it.
The screen includes two grottos behind waterfalls.
Grottos are meant to suggest the magic paradise within a mountain in which Taoist Immortals are said to dwell.
Most Choson court art was anonymous. The highly stylized painting style adopted by Korean court painters in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, a time of intense national self-consciousness, has been described by Hongnam Kim as "mysteriously archaistic, insistently nonindividualistic, and intensely symbolic." (Kim, ed. Korean Arts of the Eighteenth Century: Splendor and Simplicity [New York: Weatherhill and The Asia Society, 1993], p. 48)
There is a very similar screen in the Ho-Am Art Museum, Yongin, illustrated in Kim, op. cit., Pl. 18.
For other similar screens sold in these rooms see, sale on October 24, 1991, lot 955, and sale on April 22, 1992, lot 117,
The ten symbols usually depicted in a Shipjangsaeng screen are the sun, clouds, water, rocks, deer, cranes, tortoises, pine trees, bamboo and pulloch'o, the mythical sacred fungus. On this screen, which is rather unusual, there are no cranes and no tortoises but 74 deer (stags, does, and fawns) crowd the foreground and frolic out into the waves. According to the mythology of Chinese Taoism, exported to Korea in early times, deer were the messengers and companions of the Immortals.
The sun, clouds, water and rocks were conventionally perceived as eternal.
Pine trees stay green through the winter. Resisting harsh wind, ice and snow, they sometimes live for hundreds of years. Bamboo also remains green in winter; it bows before the wind but never breaks.
The red fiddleheads rising on short stalks just above the ground in almost every panel of the present screen represent pulloch'o, the mythical sacred fungus of Taoism. Pulloch'o is a sort of magic mushroom said to bestow immortality on those who eat it.
The screen includes two grottos behind waterfalls.
Grottos are meant to suggest the magic paradise within a mountain in which Taoist Immortals are said to dwell.
Most Choson court art was anonymous. The highly stylized painting style adopted by Korean court painters in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, a time of intense national self-consciousness, has been described by Hongnam Kim as "mysteriously archaistic, insistently nonindividualistic, and intensely symbolic." (Kim, ed. Korean Arts of the Eighteenth Century: Splendor and Simplicity [New York: Weatherhill and The Asia Society, 1993], p. 48)
There is a very similar screen in the Ho-Am Art Museum, Yongin, illustrated in Kim, op. cit., Pl. 18.
For other similar screens sold in these rooms see, sale on October 24, 1991, lot 955, and sale on April 22, 1992, lot 117,