What’s With Those Cows?
As mentioned in the previous post, I had the opportunity recently to visit an art exhibit in Daegu. Held at the Daegu Art Museum, it was a showcase of the Gansong collection, which is normally housed in the Gansong Art Museum in Seoul. Owing to interior construction work, though, the works of Korean traditional art were brought over to Daegu for a limited time. The exhibit lasted until the 26th of September — I got there just in time.
My overall impression of the exhibit was one of wonder. The oldest of the paintings dated back six hundred years, which left me in awe at the continuity of human art and intellect, but many were done in such an intimate and intricate hand that the brushes of ink could have been laid on the thin paper just yesterday. Some of the works were small, no bigger than a windowpane — others were banner-like, complete with gold flourishes against black silk. All of them were very much alive.
One thing that was baffling, however, were the cows I saw in some of the paintings.
These cows have distinctive crescent-shaped horns. However, cows native to Korea look more like this:
The native Korean cow’s horns are not as pronounced as that depicted in the two paintings, nor as curved. In the first painting especially, there is a marked difference. It appears that these painters, Yi and Kim, did not faithfully portray the cows they would doubtless have seen many times during the course of their lives. Scholars noticed this too, and raised the relevant questions: if not the native Korean cow, what breed were the cows in such paintings? Why would painters choose to paint a cow that is utterly incongruous in their depiction of the Joseon dynasty countryside?
As it turned out, the cows in the paintings were Chinese water oxen. Per the descriptions:
The first description, which pertains to Yi’s painting, states that “the large-bodied cows are not our oxen, but the water oxen from South China with crescent-shaped horns. This is the result of mimicking pictorials instead of painting from life. But the lack of exaggeration and provocation, as well as the unaffected, relaxed atmosphere make up an aesthetic that is different from China’s.” The second description about Kim’s painting similarly posits that “the fact that Chinese water oxen were drawn instead of our own points toward the limitations of the time period during which the foreign ideology from China was strong.”
Indeed, these paintings were made in the relatively earlier part of the Joseon dynasty, when Chinese influence was especially strong. An explanation for this time period from the exhibit reads as thus:
If we were to liken culture to a plant, ideology is the roots and art is the flower. As they flowered upon the basis of Neo-Confucianism from China, Early Joseon paintings could not have escaped the influence.
It was later when our ancestors studied, interpreted, and tailored ideas like Neo-Confucianism to suit the unique circumstances of Joseon, resulting in paintings of our own mountains and animals. In the meantime, the water oxen remind us that while no two cultures are quite the same, all cultures are syncretic, their family trees intertwined at the most unexpected junctures.
