Sin Saimdang Grass and Insect Painting Bottle

This is an eight-panel folding screen painted in colour by Sin Saimdang, with a different plant and insect depicted on each panel, giving it the name Chochungdo ('paintings of plants and insects'). The screen was kept at Songdam Seowon, the academy dedicated to Yulgok Yi I, but was lost when a wildfire that struck Gangneung in 1804, the fourth year of King Sunjo, spread to the academy. It was later kept in a private house in Gangneung, from where it was acquired by a descendant, Yi Jang-hui, who donated it to the Yulgok Memorial Hall in 1965, when the hall was established. The paintings take plants and insects from nature as their subject, focusing in each panel on insects associated with a particular flower, and depict more than twenty species in all. Cucumbers and aubergines convey a sense of abundance, insects and dragonflies are rendered with realistic detail that gives the scenes vitality, and the butterflies and bees flitting among the wildflowers are charmingly depicted.

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Where it is

Region

Gangneung, Gangwon

Designation

Provincial Tangible Heritage · 시도유형문화유산