Heirpetal Journal

Look up under the eaves of almost any Korean palace or Buddhist temple and the wood is not wood-colored. Every beam, bracket and rafter end is painted in bands of green and blue, red and ochre, outlined in white and black. That painting has a name, dancheong (단청), and it was never only decoration. Paint as protection Traditional Korean buildings are timber frames, and timber does not like rain, damp summers or freezing winters. Dancheong is made from mineral pigments mixed with animal glue and brushed over the wood, where it acts as a protective skin against moisture and decay and softens the effect of heat and cold. Some accounts add that it helps keep insects away. Painters renew it as it fades, which is why a freshly restored hall can look startlingly bright. Five colors, five directions The palette is built on obangsaek (오방색), the five directional colors: blue for the east, red for the south, white for the west, black for the north and yellow for the center. They come f...

It is a white jar, a little lopsided, with no painted decoration at all. It may be the most admired object in Korean art. The moon jar, dalhangari (달항아리), has hung in paintings, sold at auction for millions and been copied by potters around the world. Most of its charm comes from the things a perfectionist would call flaws. Two halves of one moon Moon jars are Joseon white porcelain, made mostly from the later 17th century through the 18th. Their size was the problem: a jar that large is hard to throw in one piece on a potter's wheel. So potters shaped the upper and lower halves as two separate bowls and joined them at the rim. The seam usually shows as a faint band around the middle, and the two halves rarely line up perfectly. In the kiln the jar slumps a little, the glaze pools and crazes, and the white comes out warm or milky or faintly blue. The result is never a perfect sphere. That is the point. A moon jar looks less manufactured than grown, which may be why it feel...

In Korea the peony has a title: the king of flowers. For centuries it stood for one wish above most others, bugwi (부귀), wealth and honor. You will find it on embroidered pillows, wedding chests and porcelain, and above all on folding screens taller than the people standing in front of them. A queen who read a painting The peony's best-known Korean story is about a painting. According to the Samguk Yusa , a 13th-century collection of histories and legends, Emperor Taizong of Tang sent Queen Seondeok of Silla peony seeds along with a picture of the flowers. The queen studied it and said the flowers would have no fragrance. When the seeds bloomed, she was proved right. Asked how she knew, she pointed out that the painting showed no butterflies. Many readers have taken the missing butterflies as a veiled jab at a ruler without a husband, and the queen's reply as a quiet win. (Real peonies, for the record, are often fragrant. The story is about reading a picture, not botany...

If you have ever seen a Korean painting of a tiger, there is a good chance it looked a little ridiculous. Wide eyes, a goofy grin, stripes that wander off in their own direction, and a small black-and-white bird sitting in a pine tree above it, apparently unafraid. That pairing has a name, and a long story behind it. Minhwa: paintings for ordinary homes The tiger-and-magpie picture belongs to minhwa , often translated as Korean folk painting. During the Joseon dynasty (1392–1897), minhwa were made for everyday households rather than palaces or scholars' studios. Most of the painters are anonymous. The pictures were meant to be used: hung for a holiday, pasted near a door, folded into a screen for a wedding. Their subjects were wishes people could name out loud: a long life, a good harvest, children, protection, good news. Kkachi horangi: the tiger, the magpie and the pine The genre is called kkachi horangi ("magpie and tiger") or jakhodo (호작도, "magpie and...