The Hanbok We Want to Wear | The ‘Social Outer Layer’ Depicted in Korean Contemporary Art

Speaking Widely Through Hanbok [風] — Seen Through the Eyes of Contemporary Artists

From folk paintings, genre paintings, and traditional portraiture to hanbok, the five traditional colors (obangsaek), and hanji, works that actively draw on motifs regarded as uniquely Korean have formed one of the major currents among young artists since the 2000s.

writer Seo Jung Ihm (art columnist)

This tendency existed in the past as well, of course, but these artists mainly try to capture a sense of contemporaneity through new perspectives and diverse media, by grafting personal history onto traditional artistic narratives or inserting contemporary popular icons into styles long fixed by traditional painting. At the same time, in order to view art that had long been seen only through a Western framework through our own subjective lens, they are making unusual attempts — researching, almost like scholars, to uncover the hidden meanings of things that have been long defined.

Within this current, hanbok — an icon representing Korean-ness — has been recognized by several artists as an especially compelling subject. Generally speaking, a country's traditional dress is a 'social outer layer' embodying the social meaning and culture of its time, and also a 'trace of social life' evoking the presence and lived texture of an individual. In that sense, hanbok, carrying the thought, custom, behavior, form, and craft that took root on Korean soil, is a medium that strongly reveals a Korean aesthetic consciousness grounded in refined character and spirit that values restraint, humility, and patience as virtues, and in consideration and respect for others. Artists who bring hanbok into their work as a central motif have not overlooked this point. Rather than fixating solely on the formal beauty of hanbok's traditional lines and shapes, they illuminate the thought, custom, and behavior handed down from the past to the present from various angles, trying to expand the range of interpretation of the signifiers we call 'Korean-ness.'

The first artist to take Korea's traditional dress as her central subject matter is Jung Myung-jo, who has meticulously depicted the 'backs' of women dressed strictly in the vivid, varied traditional clothing of the Joseon era. Since 2000, she has consistently presented women in hanbok as a symbol of beauty. The clothing she paints belongs to Joseon-era women — a queen in a robe bearing phoenix patterns, a gisaeng in pink shoes — dressed in elegant silk garments and elaborate wigs adorned with cloisonné ornaments. Rather than dressing her models in modernized clothing, the artist dresses them in historically faithful garments, photographs them, enlarges the images, and transfers them onto life-size canvases as realistically as possible — the patterns of royal Joseon dress, the shapes, colors, and even the texture of wedding garments. This is because she has no wish to insert her own interpretation or alteration into the traditional clothing, not wanting to diminish even slightly the beauty inherent in the original form.

According to the artist, the reason she so compulsively reproduces the past this way is that it is "an expression of an inner wish to reproduce a beauty from the past that is fading away in a modern society led by mechanical civilization, and at the same time, to look back at ourselves." Beyond this realist element, what makes Jung Myung-jo's work uniquely legible is, above all, the fact that she paints only the women's backs, and the black background — set in contrast to the gorgeous clothing — as a mental space carrying inner anxiety and a desire to assert oneself strongly. Because the artist always paints faceless portraits turned away from the viewer, one can only guess at the women's social status from their clothing and accessories alone. This is both the artist's intent to make clear only the fact that these are women, and a device to concentrate attention on the formal beauty of color and pattern and to maximize the anonymity and interiority of the subject.

There is also an artist who, in a manner similar to Jung Myung-jo, realistically reproduces hanbok using photographic images, but approaches the garment itself as understood as a single life — from a person's birth, marriage, and childbearing to their passing. This is the artist Lee Jin, who takes as her main subject the hanbok of Damyeon Lee Hye-soon, who has spent decades researching and making hanbok from long-preserved fabric, and projects her own perspective onto the canvas. Rather than staying rooted in the past, the artist explores how traditional hanbok is used today, and through this ultimately seeks to examine the long patience and waiting Korean women endured throughout history, and the social backdrop that forced elegance and restraint upon them — interpreting hanbok as a social device that symbolically represents the arduous lives of women of the past.

There is also an artist who takes the form of genre painting but places modern objects and her own everyday life in hanbok into it, unfolding it in diary form. Shin Sun-mi, who faithfully follows traditional coloring techniques while developing a humor-filled composition in the style of a story-within-a-story, brings her own figure, dressed elegantly in hanbok, into her paintings, conveying small, familiar everyday moments and inner feelings. Fascinated by hanbok since childhood, and long interested in the colors and patterns inherent in the clothing, the artist not only borrows historically faithful Joseon-era women's dress but tries to capture on canvas the women's dress of the three East Asian countries and the culture of the women's quarters through it. What stands out in her work is that the paintings take a story-within-a-story structure. For instance, the overall scene might be set as a momentary tableau of a woman sprawled on the floor trying to catch a cat, with the cat dropping a pillow on her as if in retort — but this turns out to be the concluding scene that resolves an earlier, messier situation caused by a comic book the woman had been reading and flung to the floor. In this way, the artist brings a past woman dressed elegantly in hanbok (herself) into the present context, drawing out a sense of playful humor through the reverse twist in which her dignity and grace collapse thanks to unexpected troublemakers — small alter-egos revealing her inner desires.

Kim Hyun Jung is likewise an artist who casts herself as a woman in hanbok, delivering sensibilities felt in everyday life through provocative gestures. In the series of works grouped under 'Naesoong,' the hanbok the artist chooses is a vividly colorful jeogori, flower shoes transformed into high heels, and a skirt sheer enough to reveal what's beneath. A woman dressed this way listens to music through earphones while exercising at fitness equipment in a neighborhood park, consoling herself with "well done today, too"; plays pocket billiards shouting "style is everything"; or shows off on inline skates or a skateboard declaring "I'm the best out there" — depicting, without filter, the complex inner life of an artist living through her twenties: the vagueness and fear of life, and the moments of joy and delight in between. At the same time, through provocative dress and behavior, she ruthlessly shatters conventions about hanbok — the idea that one must be dignified, careful in behavior and mindset — conventions that have become fixed and unconsciously accepted in the modern era, metaphorically revealing the social environment that has implicitly regulated women.

These works lead viewers to reinterpret the grammar of hanbok — long defined in the West purely through line and color — as a unique aesthetic rooted in the spirituality of tradition, and to see it as a mirror through which to look into the society and culture that this land called Korea has lived through.

Written by — Seo Jung Ihm (Art Columnist)