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A Study on Diversity of Korean Aesthetic Consciousness and The Classification Through its Types
The Journal of Aesthetics and Science of Art
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Recent Studies on Korean beauty were carried not only in every genres of art, but also in many spiritual aspects of problem like philological inquires, and influence of religious culture, resulting in various aesthetic consciousness. This paper aims at collecting these research findings, categorizing the aesthetic consciousness commonly emphasized by researchers, and finally examining their characteristics. Thereby we tried to grasp the uniqueness of Korean aesthetic consciousness from a broad viewpoint. Firstly, we try to look into the basis of Korean aesthetic consciousness from the point of spiritual view. The aesthetic directionality toward the intergration between oppositions in Korean people is often expressed as an aesthetic consciousness being combined with contradictory attributes. Taking examples for it, they could be expressed as the aesthetic consciousness in which the most masterful skill and rustic and artless state coexist, and deep sorrow and cheerful enthusiastic mind alternate with, enhancing aesthetic level higher than ever. Secondly, we looked into the important meanings of art rooted in the people's everyday life, what we call types of aesthetic ideas, Naturalism, beauty of human mind. ‘Naturalism’ is interpreted as an aesthetic idea to drag much greater thing into the art beyond the humane. The Korean aesthetic consciousness is strongly tend to take into more considerations the spiritual beauty of subject than the sensuous formal beauty of object. Particularly the Korean people place high values in simple and honest human beauty rooted deeply in the peoples life. Thirdly, there are specific categories that represent Korean aesthetic consciousness, that are ‘Meot’(taste), ‘deviation’, ‘Shinmung’, ‘Poong Ryoo’, ‘Humor’, ‘Han’, ‘Heung’, ‘absence of the wordly desires’, ‘archaic artlessness’. These categories show that cheerful and pleasant emotions are expressed as ‘Heung’(excitement) and Shinmyung, sad emotion is expressed ‘Han’(sorrow) in Korean art. Korean aesthetic consciousness exposes a certain contemplative spirit embracing all emotions as a part of ways of the world and reason of nature and universe. The contemplative attitude to life based on cheerful emotion is revealed in Humor. Humor is marked by seeing through essence of life, not losing sympathy and understanding of the others, and is sublimated in the community spirit. Further more Humor tend to raise an aesthetic consciousness called Poong Ryoo that sublimates all the emotions into the higher dimension. Poong Ryoo is supposedly included in ‘Han’ and ‘Humor’ in connection that the aesthetic consciousness is universal unifying contrasting emotions, like the tragic and the comic. Katharsis arises emotionally out of repressed feelings, when the conflicting emotions are interchanged and sublimated. Therefore Poong Ryoo is to include even unworldlineness, absence of the wordly desires. Accepting conditions of their life, Koreans had strongly expressed driving force in life that is capable of turning ‘Han’(sorrow) into Shinmyung (excitement) in art. This force represents Korean people’s aspiration which integrates the conflicts in the community, interchanging contrasting emotions each other and sublimating all sort of human emotions in totality of life.
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