For the most part, the art of both North Korea and South Korea share a common history. Granted, different kingdoms throughout its history had their own identity and styles, but generally speaking, it was pretty similar between them.

The earliest form of art was in clay pottery. A number of different techniques were used to create a variety of effects. One notable technique was called Juelman-style pottery, where the pots formed a rounded cone at the bottom and was decorated with a comb pattern.

Bronze was the first metal Koreans began to work with. Although it was originally imported into Korea, it didn’t take long for them to learn how to do it themselves. Soon they were using bronze to make daggers, swords, and other weapons as well as bells, rattles, and beads that were used in rituals and ceremonies.

Although the Chinese created celadon pottery, the Koreans perfected it. The unique greenish hue was created from using a special glaze over the pottery and lowering the oxygen levels during the firing process in the kiln. (There’s a trucking company in Indianapolis called Celadon, and I think they really missed out on using that green color in its logo.)

Like China and Japan, Korean calligraphy was also a highly skilled art. It’s thought that the brushstrokes and the subject matter gave insight into the artist’s personality. Likewise, Korean artists also created art from the paper itself, including papermaking (my sister did papermaking when she studied in Japan), but paper was also used and decorated as wall coverings, screens, and even floor coverings. Paper was also used for making fans, folded figures, and for printing. Paper arts are still a thing today.

By the time the 20^thcentury rolled around, painting was probably the most popular style of art. And following Western art movements, Korean artists began experimenting with abstract art during the 1930s. By the 1960s, artists were using a number of mediums, from oil and ink painting to creating different textures with paint, pencils, and paper. Some of the more prominent painters include Park Seo-Bo (abstract artist, founded Seo-Bo Art and Cultural Foundation), Lee Ufan (minimalist painter and sculptor), Lee Dong-youb (abstract painter in post-modernism), Suh Yongsun (painter and sculptor), Junggeun Oh(minimalism, abstract mixed with realism), and Tschoon Su Kim(painter and professor).

by Suh Yongsun

South Korean literature is primarily written in Korean. Like Japanese, modern Korean literature also uses many borrowed words from English, and probably a few other languages as well.

Early Korean literature was mainly in the form of poetry. Four main types of poems dominated during this time: native songs (“hyangga”), special songs/long poems (“pyolgok/changga”), current melodies (“sijo”), and verses (“kasa”). Early fiction began around the 1100s and 1200s, mostly relegated to historical fiction, myths, legends, and folktales. It flourished again during the 1600s and 1700s. The Koreans also carried a tradition of oral literature and drama.

During the 20^th century, some Western literature (including the Bible) began being translated into Korean. During the time of Japanese occupation, Japanese literature helped to cultivate modern Korean literary movements. Just after the war and the division of the Koreas, many writers and poets began to go back to more traditional roots of poetry. But by the 1960s, a number of writers began to change their style: modern Western influences shifted their focus to more anti-establishment and addressed concerns regarding the accelerated changes they were seeing in the nation’s modern development.

Some modern authors include Jim Lee(comic book artist/writer), Lee Cheong-jun (wrote over 100 short stories and 13 novels), Miri Yu (novelist, essayist, playwright, writes in her native Japanese), Ku Sang (considered a respected poet), Gong Ji-young (novelist, one of the more well known female writers to emerge in the 1980s), among many more. 

Up next: music and dance