This study seeks to clarify the identity of East Asian literati painting by examining the formation and development of its concepts and theories, which have become increasingly obscured amid the discourses of “Eastern modernism” in the modern era and “Korean modernism” in contemporary art. It investigates how key conceptual foundations—such as xieyi (寫意, expressive representation), jianshuai (簡率, simplicity), shihua yilu (詩畵一律, unity of poetry and painting), shuhua tongfa (書畵同法, shared principles of calligraphy and painting), yuji (餘技, secondary art), ziyū (自娛, self-amusement), and moxi (墨戱, play with ink)—emerged and spread within historical contexts shaped by the elite consciousness of the literati painter (文人畵家) since the Northern Song period. Through an analysis of the formation process of these terms and ideas, this paper also explores how they were transmitted to Korea and Japan.
Originating in the poetic, calligraphic, and pictorial practices of the sadaebu (scholar-officials), who were simultaneously the intellectual and political elites, literati painting was established in the Northern Song as an artistic mode distinct from the professional painter’s craft and was consolidated during the Yuan dynasty. From mid-Goryeo and the Muromachi period onward, poetry, calligraphy, and painting were mutually disciplined and intertwined within the creative sphere mediated by literati painting across East Asia. Yet, as the ideal of manifesting the generative spirit of all things through a unified spiritual form was typified into the Southern School (南宗畵) landscape mode under the “Southern-Northern School” (南北二派論) distinction of the late Ming, literati painting began to experience a crisis of identity. In early modern Japan—where no hereditary scholar-official class existed—professional painters such as Ike no Taiga reinterpreted its ideals through the stylistic framework of the Southern School, giving rise to the hybrid notion of “Southern-school literati painting” (nanshō bunjinga).
In the early modern era, as East Asian societies underwent reform movements aspiring toward the value systems of the Western powers, literati painting was dismissed as a feudal remnant and subjected to rejection and eradication. However, following World War I, as self-criticism of Western modern civilization emerged, Japan witnessed the rise of Pan-Asianism and Neo-Japaneseism as anti-Western, de-Westernizing ideologies. Within this discourse of “overcoming modernity,” literati painting was re-evaluated as both a symbol of national spirit and the classical essence of national art. For literati painting to be repositioned as an open, transhistorical concept within global art history, it is necessary to move beyond the confusions produced by its translation and re-contextualization within the value system of Western modernism. This requires a historically grounded elucidation of the actual process of its conceptual formation, along with a critical reappraisal of the ideological structures of modernity that shaped its reception.