Wuhyng Go Yuseop (1905-1944) is ranked as a father first establishing foundation of Korean art history and aesthetics. Despite of his short 40-year life, his achievements, considering poor research conditions that time, are amazingly profound and extensive enough to compare to those of today.
Characteristics of Go Yuseop’s tradition awareness, as suggested in “Peculiarities in Korean art are soon tradition of Korean art,” are that it is deeply interrelated to aesthetic consciousness. Even though he did not directly mention the tradition or borrow the form of its discourse, people can somewhat discover evidences of his traditional awareness by tracing the context of his writings and aesthetic consciousness.
The core of Go Yuseop’s traditional awareness can be his viewpoint focusing on Buddhist art and historical background before Goryeo Dynasty. It is pointed out as limitation of the times and the person himself that he considered Goryeo Dynasty as the classic of tradition and Joseon Dynasty as disgraceful period with the tradition declined. It is because his relatively little attention to Joseon with recognizing Joseon as the reason of state’s collapse cannot be definitely viewed separately from recognition of Japanese national scholars. In addition, theories of Dharma-kaya(法身) and Nirmana-kaya(應身) are important keyword to understand the basis of his traditional awareness. The concepts of Dharma-kaya and Nirmana-kaya which borrow the form of tritheism(三神論) to classify the tradition as an unchangeable value and as varying element depending on time and environment are still in use of the academic world today long after Go Yuseops time.
Though Go Yuseop is respected as the father of Korean art history, his personal and historical limitations are clearly not inconsiderable. Go Yuseop’s lifetime and the period of his activity is exactly the same with the historically unfortune, other-directed ear. As an intellectual who lived an unhappy life in the modern period, he would have shouldered too much heavy responsibility as an individual who first stepped into the fields of art history and aesthetics. It would be the manifestation of national consciousness and Go Yuseop would have been repeatedly tormented between colonial knowledge systems absorbed through academic frames along with actual issues of the nation that he recognized himself even without realizing it.