아시아 여성화가의 ‘여성상’ - 천경자와 女子美術學校 졸업생을 축으로

Abstract

Chun Kyung-ja (1924–2015), often referred to as the painter of “Dream and 情恨” and “Flower and Fantasy,” has left numerous imageries of women that are as beautiful as the words used to describe them. This study, straying from the traditionally followed autobiographical perspective, is an attempt to assess the imageries of women that have been actively created since the 1970s in a larger framework of Asia’s female painters who established their territory within an androcentric society of painters. Specifically, by placing the focus on Tokyo’s Joshibi (女子美術學校), at which Chun Kyung-ja had her start in Japanese painting, this study considers Japanese painter Kataoka Tamako (片岡球子, 1905–2008) and Taiwanese painter Chen Chin (陳進, 1907–1998) as the subjects of discussion and examines the topic, style, and other aspects of their paintings. Founded in 1901, Joshibi was perhaps the only female art institute at the time, and many students from Japan and elsewhere in Asia grew as artists through this institution. Despite the differences in nationality, date of birth, years of activity, etc., the works of Kataoka, Chen Chin, and Chun Kyung-ja, all of whom studied Japanese painting, share the commonality. The homogeneity evident among the works of female painters, however, dissipated during the 1950s amid rapid changes in the society of painters. Chun Kyung-ja also sought a change from a more realistic to a semi-abstract style, and she produced, after the 1970s, color paintings that exhibit the theme of woman. Although the development of Chun Kyung-ja’s painting career, which is illustrated with a controversy regarding the Japanese-influenced style in color paintings, separation of the figurative and the non-figurative, etc., does not seem irrelevant from the trends of the society of painters, it also speaks for the adversity she encountered in her attempt to establish her own territory within an androcentric society through color paintings with figurativeness.