Aesthetic Consideration of Hyangpa Lee Juhong’s Calligraphy and Painting

Abstract

Lee Juhong(1906-1987) was a writer, educator, and artist, born in Hapcheon, Gyeongsangnam-do, and worked in Busan. This paper is a study of his calligraphy, poetry, and painting. He experienced various hardships during his life of 80 years, including Japanese rule and the Korean War. Therefore, he expressed human agony and the fundamental essence of his difficult life through various genres of art, including literature. He led students to culture and art during his entire life as a professor of the Department of Korean Language and Literature at the National Fisheries University of Busan, integrated by Pukyong National University in Busan afterward. In addition, he was a comprehensive artist who engaged in artistic activities in a variety of genres, including poetry, novels, essays, plays, and criticism, as well as children's poems, fairy tales, juvenile fiction, calligraphy and painting, folk paintings, comics, book designing and binding, and theater directing. He also wrote collections of literary works and translations that amount to about 300 volumes. I analyzed and examined Hyangpa Lee Juhong’s calligraphy and painting by classifying them into literary communication aesthetics of calligraphy and painting and authentic East Asian aesthetics of calligraphy. The simple beauty, humorous beauty, and natural beauty abstracted from the literary communication aesthetics of calligraphy and painting help the aesthetic emotions organically linked in Hyangpa’s poetry, painting, and calligraphy to communicate through the integrated empathy of creation and appreciation. Therefore, I confirmed that simple, humorous, and nature-friendly works become communication aesthetics that heals complex minds. I summarized the authentic East Asian aesthetics of calligraphy into five beauties.: The first is the simple and gentle beauty that looks smiling. The second is the beauty that to have and to lack generate each other, and the third is the beauty that expresses a neat yet majestic aura with flowing strokes. The next is the beauty that is plain but not sick of, and the last is the magnanimous beauty while remaining faithful to nature without restraint. He used diverse genres of literature and various fields of art. He attempted many experimental things in calligraphy, so we could evaluate that he created a new style and method of calligraphy. In addition, the humanistic, literary, and aesthetic sentiments accompanying Confucius's humanism and Zhuangzi's vital freedom at the bottom of Hyangpa art formed his view of literature, art, and life. Thus, they elaborately emerged in Hyangpa’s calligraphy and painting.