李奎報 題畵詩를 통한 高麗 花鳥畫의 一考察

Abstract

Yi Gyu-bo's poems on paintings show ideal harmony of poetry-picture concurrence by breathing new life into paintings through vibrant description that came from the freshness of his poetic inspiration and artistic point of view. Especially, the poems he wrote on the flower and bird paintings, in addition to the his view on their production process and his critique, are characterized by the vivid detailed descriptions that almost make the reader feel like s/he is looking at the picture. Hence, his poems can be a valuable resource for studying the style and features of the flower and bird paintings of Goryeo and also the background in which they were produced. Yi Gyu-bo saw flower and bird paintings as a branch of literati painting and recognized that any painting that contains the essence of things, whether they be bamboos, flowers or birds, can work as the agent that retains the effects of the actual objects. Accordingly, he emphasized that if one is painting a bird one should try to capture and represent its mind and spirit, and when it is successfully captured, then painting can be said to have been granted god's support. The stylistic features that Yi Guy-bo mentioned when he commented on the flower and bird paintings can be traced back to the bird and flower icons in Goryeo Buddhist paintings or ceramics or the flower and bird paintings from Joseon. One can find the stylistic features of the crane painting that the Great Master Yangyeon showed Yi Gyu-bo in the crane that appear in the paradise of Amitabha in the illustration of Buddhist sutra of Goryeo. Yi Gyu-bo wrote poems on three paintings of the white heron, one of which includes the picture of a pair of white herons that marks the stylistic origin of the two heron paintings of early Joseon dynasty along with Sin Saimdang's work. Also, it seems that the picture of a white heron in a reed bed marks the origin of black-and-white ink painting of a heron. He captures and expresses the elegant, relaxed and unworldly image of a heron, and also in the poem that he wrote to the picture of a heron and water peppers, he expressed his understanding and affection of the nature of the heron. Yi Gyu-bo's perspectives are the two typical ways which the Joseon intellectuals viewed heron paintings, and are expressed through the heron painting icons. By analyzing Yi Gyu-bo's poems on flower and bird paintings, this article examined the purpose for which Joseon intellectuals produced and viewed the flower and bird paintings and traced their stylistic features. This could mark as the beginning of understanding the flower and bird painting as part of Korean literati painting and a full-fledged effort in examining of the early mode of Korea's flower and bird paintings.