영조대 후반 책가도(冊架圖) 수용의 세 가지 풍경

Abstract

Chaekgado (Korean still-life screen painting of shelves with books and objects) is a classic example that symbolizes the visual culture of the late Joseon dynasty derived from the Bukhak (Northern Learning, a reformative intellectual movement to learn Qing culture) and Seohak (Western technology and philosophy). Chaekgado was introduced to Joseon Korea through the envoys to Beijing during the mid-eighteenth century when they imported some Chinese paintings in the Western pictorial manner. These pictures depicted doubaoge (Chinese treasure cabinets) with books and scholars’ accouterments. Jo Jonghyeon (1731-1800) left a record that shows in detail how chaekgado paintings imported from Qing China were appreciated by Korean literati. Sometime between the 1750s and the 1760s, he bought a colored picture similar to xingle tu (painting of leisure activities), portraying a gentleman having a cup of tea in front of doubaoge cabinets with scholar’s books and utensils for the gentry. It is noteworthy that Jo named this picture as chaekgado and installed it in his library for appreciation. In 1769, Gang Wan (1739-1775) built a doubaoge cabinet by himself in order to display his beloved books and items. The manufacturing of a Chinese-style cabinet by a Joseon scholar shows that the genre of chaekgado was proliferating in Korea. The case of Gang Wan highlights how Chinese pictures of books and utensils were adapted and transformed into Korean chaekgado. On the other hand, Kim Saju (1734-1798) rejected an offer from an itinerant painter in 1769 to draw a chaekgado. Disparaging this type of painting to be ‘vulgar,’ Kim asked for two pieces of haengnak do (Ch. xingle tu) that featured a scholar’s leisure activities in a studio and a landscape painting of a garden instead. This episode reveals that chaekgado gained wide popularity and came to be secularized. At the same time, the story also shows literati’s reaction against and negative attitudes towards the popularity of chaekgado during the late Yeongjo (r. 1724-1776) period. As the case of Kim Saju demonstrates, cultural discourse on the elegant vs. the vulgar already took shape.