Reaching “Peach Blossom Spring”: Poetry and Painting in Fifteenth-Century Korea and Japan

Abstract

This dissertation explores the fifteenth-century Korean and Japanese phenomenon of envisioning an ideal place, representing it in poetry and painting, and combining the two into one unified work. Korean and Japanese intellectuals admired idyllic landscapes imagined in Chinese literature, such as the Peach Blossom Spring, a utopian landscape described in a fifth-century Chinese tale by the renowned Tao Yuanming. Their representations of such landscapes in poem-painting scrolls illuminate the East Asian reception of Chinese classics and how such scrolls became sites in which they displayed knowledge of Chinese culture and versatility in poetry and painting. At the same time, the differences highlight these actors’ agency in adapting Chinese artistic forms in response to contemporary Korean and Japanese sociocultural contexts.Chapter One examines the origins of these scrolls, focusing on Chinese ideals of poetry-painting unity and reclusion, which embodied scholarly identity and political sentiments. Chapter Two investigates poem-painting projects by the royal patron, Prince Anp’yŏng, especially Dream Journey to the Peach Blossom Spring (1447–50), through which the prince and his associates developed a collaborative poem-painting culture that signaled Anp’yŏng’s cultural and political aspirations. Chapter Three explores how the prince’s favored painter, An Kyŏn, reimagined the Peach Blossom Spring in his Dream Journey painting, employing Korean sources rather than only Chinese models. Chapter Four discusses two Japanese works, Hidden Cottage by a Mountain Stream (1413) and Mountain Villa (before 1415), showing how Japanese Zen monks and secular elites addressed Chinese ideals in light of Zen principles and Japanese political realities. The epilogue considers the decline of these poem-painting scrolls in post-fifteenth-century Korea and Japan, while recognizing the lasting influence of the ideals of poetry-painting unity and reclusion, which resurged in eighteenth-century literati painting. Through a comparative, interdisciplinary, and transcultural perspective, this dissertation eschews art-historical and literary analyses that treat paintings and texts separately rather than as a single, unified expression. Instead, I study these works as sites of collective agency, where patrons, poets, and painters responded to, and inspired, one another, demonstrating the dynamic and distinctive qualities of this paradigmatic cultural practice of fifteenth-century Korea and Japan.