Repressed Desires and Forced Coercion by Miju Kwak - Essay Example

Repressed Desires and Forced Coercion by Miju Kwak For this Visual Analysis essay, I selected two works of art by the famous Korean artist, Shin Yun-Bok, entitled ‘A Widow’s Lust in Spring’ based on the theme of lust, and ‘A Young Boy Plucking an Azalea’ based on the theme of love. I chose these two paintings because they depict the lives of women during the Joseon Dynasty period in Korea. During the Joseon Dynasty in Korea, women were considered to be of a low birth status. They were treated as inferior to men throughout their life. For example, women were forced to remain faithful to their husbands even after they died. “Faithfulness” was not an option for women. Rather, it was forced upon them. If a widow did not maintain her integrity after her husband died, she was treated as a turncoat. It was to be kept safe even if her husband died moments before the wedding. From the modernists’ point of view, this type of custom is ridiculous. However, for Joseon women, it was considered proper. As opposed to this way of life of women during the Joseon Dynasty, men did not have to remain faithful to their wives. Moreover, they could also get a lot of mistresses. In fact, this was considered proper for men in the Joseon Dynasty. As a result, men were the most popular subjects for artwork during these times in Korea. Nobody wanted to draw a woman as an important subject. However, there was a famous painter whose name was “Shin Yun-bok”. He was the only painter who drew women regarding them as important subjects, and this was the distinguishing mark of his works of art. He painted various types of women in different contexts to visually illustrate their lives during the Joseon Dynasty time period. For instance, in some paintings, he painted a widow, a gisaeng, which means a girl who sings and dances for men, and an old procuress. Shin Yun-bok was the only one who was very attentive to the desires of women who lived during the Joseon Dynasty. For this reason, we can see depictions of how the lives of women actually were during the Joseon Dynasty in all of his paintings. It is difficult to obtain information on who Shin Yun-bok himself was and when he painted all his paintings. There are very few details remaining about him. According to the Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism, Shin Yun-bok, better known by his pen name Hyewon, was a Korean painter of the Joseon Dynasty. He was born in 1758 in Goryung, Korea, although we do not know when he died. He is known for his realistic depictions of daily life in his time, which is called “Pungsokdo”. He uses flowing and elegant drawing lines and beautiful coloring in order to show the romantic atmosphere between a man and a woman (Towooart). His paintings are distinctly more erotic than of any other contemporary artists, so it is no surprise to learn about his expulsion from the royal painting institute, Dohwaseo. Hyewon's father had also been a court painter. (Ministry of CultureSports) My favorite piece of painting from Shin Yun-bok’s works of art is “A widow's lust in spring” (KangMyunggwan). In this painting, there are two women sitting on a low-lying branch of a tree, watching two dogs mating. The woman on the left is wearing white clothes. This signifies that she has recently lost her husband. The other woman looks like her maid. Both are sitting together on a pine tree in a backyard enclosed by a wall of stones. Outside the wall, there is a flowering tree in full blossom. This shows that it is the spring season. And, in the foreground, are the dogs that are mating. Actually, the dogs are not the only couple that are mating. In the middle ground, there are two birds that are also mating, whilst a third one is watching the dogs mating. The two women are at the right end of the middle ground. The dogs that are absorbed in their mating grab my attention at first sight. How indecent it is! This painting is perhaps the only one that depicts the act of mating between dogs from the period of the Joseon Dynasty. Moreover, the birds are mating too, and another bird is watching them. The single bird resembles the widow. She is alone without her husband and watching the dogs mating. It expresses her loneliness and sexual desire. Women during the Joseon Dynasty were forced to choose either remarriage or faithfulness at the moment when their husbands died (KangMyunggwan). At that time, ethic books that the government spread praised the virtue of “faithfulness”. If a widow chose to remarry, her children were regarded of low birth and were not able to enter into government service. So, they were treated discriminatingly. Every woman knew this, and this policy compelled most women to remain faithful after being widowed. Women have their own wants and their own lives, but unlike men during the Joseon Dynasty, they were treated as mere belongings. As opposed to men who could get numerous women as mistresses, women had to be “Yulnyeo”, which means a woman of chaste reputation. An extreme case of showing women’s faithfulness was suicide when they lost their husbands. If a widow killed herself right after she lost her husband, she was granted the title of “Yulnyeo”, and it was an honor to her family and the society where she lived (KangMyunggwan). How brutal this practice is! Referring back to the painting “A widow's lust in spring”, it may be asked, what did Shin Yun-bok want to express through this painting? The widow is not even embarrassed. She is watching the dogs mating quite happily, and with a smile on her face. This means that she is enjoying the scene. We can see that the widow has the same desire as other people. From the dogs and birds that are mating, we can see the fact that human also have the same sexual desire as animals. There is no difference between humans and animals in this painting in terms of the sexual desire. Therefore, Shin Yun-bok wanted to show the myth of faithfulness of women during the Joseon Dynasty period. In other words, “Faithfulness” did not really exist. Rather, it was forced upon women and only suppressed their natural desire, and who were consequently careful of not being seen. The second work of art that I selected is “A young boy plucking an azalea” by the same artist Shin Yun-bok (KangMyunggwan). In this painting, apparently, we can see that a young man is grabbing a girl’s wrist. Moreover, he looks like a married man of a high social status, whereas the girl is a servant girl of his house. So, he is flirting with her. She pulls her hips back and hesitates to follow him. She looks embarrassed. We can see why he wants to flirt with her. She is very buxom. She has full hips and bosom. On the left side of the painting, there are oddly shaped stones and flowering trees. They help create a scene of arousing a feeling of sexual desire. The young man’s attitude towards the girl makes me very uncomfortable. His hairstyle shows us that he is apparently a married man, but despite him already being married, he also wants to take the girl. We can see that the girl is hesitating to follow him. Also, she is trying to take her wrist back from the young man. During the Joseon Dynasty, this was not an untypical occurrence. Men in high social status could easily get more girls as mistresses. The happening in “A young boy plucking an azalea” was the one way to take a girl. They did not hesitate to get another girl for themselves. As I mentioned previously, men were actually encouraged to engage in this form of behavior, whereas in contrast, women were encouraged to kill themselves in order to prove their faithfulness. “A widow's lust in spring” and “A young boy plucking an azalea” frankly shows the real status of women during the Joseon Dynasty in Korea. Men had all the advantages in life including getting mistresses to satisfy their sexual desires. But, women did not have the freedom to do what they wanted in respect of their own desires. In “A widow's lust in spring”, a widow is shown as remaining faithful for the rest of her life. But in reality, her life would be worse than the life of the she-dog or the she-bird in the painting. On the other hand, the young man in “A young boy plucking an azalea” is flirting with a servant girl who does not want him. And, he is encouraged to do so even he is married. Examining these two paintings of Shin Yun-bok from an artistic perspective, we see that Shin Yun-bok successfully manages to portray the feelings of women during the time of the Joseon Dynasty in Korea by creating fairly vivid scenes of their daily lives. Importantly, this also accurately conveys to us the situation of women during this period in a preserved pictorial form. The painter makes effective use of gradations using mostly light colors for the background and darker colors for the subjects, especially yellow and cream shades in the first picture and red shades as well as some blues in the second. This identifiable style of application of color is characteristic of his paintings. The two paintings under scrutiny are typical examples of the painter’s other paintings in so far as all attempt to show the life of women, the themes of love and lust being two common issues concerning women. They are also typical Korean oil paintings of the time utilizing brushwork, and which tend to focus on landscapes and facial features to express scenes and feelings respectively. It is clear that Shin Yun-bok depicted how people lived during the Joseon Dynasty in all of his paintings. However, he chose mostly women, who were excluded from the mainstream artworks as subjects by other contemporary artists. This means he wanted to illustrate and preserve the actual circumstances of women and their lives during the Joseon Dynasty times in Korea, and at the same time indict men’s behavior toward women. One thing that confuses me is how Shin Yun-bok got the idea of painting women in the first place. As I mentioned already, men in the Joseon Dynasty times were very masterful. Therefore, it is hard to conceive that Shin Yun-bok could be an exception to what was the normality at the time. Furthermore, there is scant biographical information about the Shin Yun-bok, so we do not know much about the painter’s own personal life. These days, in Korea, the assertion that Shin Yun-bok was really a woman who disguised herself as a man is raised. This scenario is thought to be possible. It makes it understandable why Shin Yun-bok chose women as a subject of art to delicately depict their psychological nature and express their feelings, and therefore could be the likely explanation of why these paintings were made. Whether Shin Yun-bok was a woman or not, we only have his or her paintings as a preservation of life during the Joseon Dynasty period of Korea without any further information of the painter, not even the time when he or she painted them. Maybe because of that, we can give full play to our imagination when we look at the paintings by Shin Yun-bok. Both paintings of Shin Yun-bok depict the theme of life of women, in particular the status of women and their sexual feelings during the Joseon Dynasty period in Korea. Unlike men who had the freedom of remarrying and obtaining mistresses for satisfying their own sexual pleasures and were even encouraged to do so, women were looked down upon; treated as mere belongings of men, and encouraged to remain ‘faithful’ and obliging to all that it entailed. Consequently, this created an atmosphere of resentment and repression of women’s sexual feelings and desires on one hand and an affront to their freedom during the common moments of forced coercion by men wanting to satisfy their own sexual desires on the other. The two paintings preserve for us explicit illustrations of two related aspects of the sexual life of women during the period in question. Works Cited Kang, Myunggwan. Joseon People, Stepping Out of Hyewon's painting. Seoul-si: Pureun Yuksa, 2008. Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism. Munhwainmul Museum. 2006. 1 11 2008 . Towooart. 1999. 1 11 2008 . Read More