Visual Nationalism and Communal Rituals: Park Saengkwang’s Art and Korean Shamanism

This paper analyzes Park Saengkwang (1904-1985)’s artwork, created in the 1980s and influenced by Musok, Korean Shamanism. It explores Musok’s thematic significance in the development of his distinctive style and the inspiration behind his stylistic changes. Park’s ink paintings are done in bold and intense colors and create an intriguing, mysterious mood, inviting the viewers to the primordial visual experience and exposing its viewers to Korean Shamanism, which has endured the perception that fluctuated between positive and negative throughout      Korean history. The practice became a fitting cultural emblem associated with the national identity during the   1970s and 1980s, and thus became a way for Park to explicitly articulate his cultural roots, creating a visual connotation of “Korean.” His art, portraying gut, Korean shamanistic communal rituals, could be conceived as a pictorial rendering of the idea of kibok, praying for good fortune, and served as a pujŏk, talisman paper, that  possesses magical healing and protecting power. By striving to overcome the stylistic conflicts between Korean   and Japanese, or traditional and Western, Park’s art accomplished the visual rhetoric of national aesthetic    sensitivity that built on the communal thoughts and cultural experience of shamanism in the modern history of  Korea.