Mountain Spirit Painting in Sangse-dong, Gongju

The Mountain Spirit Painting in Sangse-dong is a sansindo, a shamanistic Buddhist painting of the Mountain Spirit, commissioned in the late Joseon period by the patron Sin Yang-seon to pray for the well-being of the Korean Empire, and painted by the monk-painter Geumhodang Yakhyo; it measures 125 by 125 centimetres. The composition of this Mountain Spirit painting has unusual elements. The Mountain Spirit holds a feather fan in his left hand, and directly below him are two child attendants, a boy and a girl. The attendant closer to the Mountain Spirit holds up a tray bearing a haetae, while the attendant beside him carries a woven bag. The haetae is a guardian deity that wards off evil, shaped like an animal but in fact an imaginary emblem, regarded as a divine beast that repels fire and disaster; a pair is usually set up on either side of a building's entrance, with a popular belief that they protect large buildings such as palaces from fire. In the Mountain Spirit Painting in Sangse-dong the haetae is likely to carry this same meaning of warding off disaster, and the unusual composition involving the child attendants suggests a nineteenth-century trend in which such paintings were coming to replace mountain spirit paintings that featured a magpie.

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Where it is

Region

Gongju, Chungnam

Designation

Provincial Tangible Heritage · 시도유형문화유산