As Netflix's “KPop Demon Hunters” captivates viewers worldwide (me included — repeatedly) to remain a global hit, I recall Zo Za-yong, a pioneer of Korea’s 20th-century folk art movement.

Decades before today’s fascination with Derpy, a mysterious tiger messenger in the musical animation, Zo tirelessly collected, preserved and exhibited humorous tiger-and-magpie paintings and other folk works of art that came close to being destroyed and forgotten.

In the 1960s and 1970s, when putting three meals a day on the table was a struggle for many Koreans, the nation’s cultural heritage was an afterthought. The beauty and meaning in the work of nameless artists received scant attention and often ended up in throwaway piles.

Native folk art forms, whether tangible or intangible, quickly disappeared amid a widespread notion that modernization meant Westernization. The “new community” movement, initiated by President Park Chung-hee for economic development, further accelerated the destruction of old village culture.

Given his career as a US-educated architect, a rare qualification in the country at the time, Zo was an unlikely person to organize decisive efforts to rediscover and promote Korean folk arts and culture. More than that, his vibrant energy motivated others to join the cause, earning the nicknames “Horay” (Tiger) and “Dokkaebi” (Goblin), both as expressions of amity and respect.

A refugee from Hwanghae Province, now in North Korea, Zo went to the United States in 1947 to continue his education. After earning degrees in civil engineering from Vanderbilt University and structural engineering from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, he returned to war-ravaged Korea in 1954. He participated in many projects to rebuild the country and, along the way, the nation’s cultural heritage grabbed his interest.

Zo traveled extensively around the country to study traditional Korean architecture and, in the course, began collecting ancient roof tiles, including those with demon face designs. The seminal moment came in 1967.

During one of his frequent trips to the Seoul antique alley of Insa-dong, Zo purchased some wooden rice cake molds. The molds were wrapped with an old folk painting depicting an amusing tiger with a magpie perched on a pine branch over its head. The funny and gullible expression of the tiger image entranced Zo. To him, the painting was close to abstract art. “Even Picasso would have been amazed!” he once recalled, laughing.

In 1968, Zo opened the Emille House in Deungchon-dong, western Seoul, a two-story structure employing traditional Korean architectural motifs, with protruding columns in tiger paw design. It was renamed the Emille Museum in 1970 and became a sanctuary of Korean folk art, housing thousands of old folk paintings, roof tiles, totem poles, stone tigers and tortoises, and wooden craft objects.

From there, Zo organized exhibitions of Korean folk paintings, 17 held in Korea and 12 in the US and Japan. The exhibitions required explanations in books, catalogs and pamphlets, prompting Zo to produce enormous volumes of writings in Korean, English and Japanese. With little preceding research, he depended on his own observations and studies of objects, basing his theories on purely empirical evidence.

Zo concluded that Korean folk paintings were mostly representations of the “guardians of happiness,” invoking good fortune and repelling evil spirits. In his interpretation, folk paintings did not exist as separate art objects, but vital elements of mythology and folklore. At its core, he contended, was shamanism as the nation’s indigenous belief before the influx of foreign religions and norms, such as Confucianism, Buddhism and Christianity.

“These paintings are little known yet in the world, but I believe they will eventually be known widely around the world as Korea’s proud cultural representations,” he wrote in one of his essays.

In his later years, when he was based in Boeun, North Chungcheong Province, Zo devoted himself to the research and propagation of Samsin — the Trinity Goddess — as the quintessential being in Korean folk belief, governing childbirth and life. As leader of the Folkists Society and self-styled champion of the “old community” movement, he supported traditional village rites for enhancing communal harmony and solidarity.

Zo succumbed to overwork and passed away in 2000 during an exhibition of “King Goblins, Tigers and Dragons” for children at Daejeon Expo Science Park. He was 74. His legacy survives in a significant number of folk paintings from his collection that found their way into the Ho-Am Art Museum, as well as a three-volume publication of “Collected Writings by Zo Za-yong,” published by Gahoe Museum, which serves as a crucial basis for research by scholars of later generations.

Gahoe Museum, a small facility run by Yoon Yul-soo, former curator at Emille Museum, combines an exhibition hall and folk-art academy on a street of hanok, Korea's traditional houses, in Seoul’s Jongno. On my visit last weekend, I could see the museum also enjoying a remarkable surge in visitors, thanks to “KPop Demon Hunters.”

Across the capital, the National Museum of Korea reportedly has an amazing volume of visitors from home and abroad, crowding the souvenir shop to buy tiger and magpie badges. They are on back order for months to be fulfilled.

Lee Kyong-hee

Lee Kyong-hee is a former editor-in-chief of The Korea Herald. The views expressed here are the writer's own. — Ed.


khnews@heraldcorp.com