ANONYMOUS.

Kimjip hwayŏng sŏkpo 錦集花營釋譜 [Flowery Camp & the Biography of Śākyamuni: An Illustrated Album].

Woodblock-printed throughout in hangul & Chinese characters of different sizes. 350 woodcut illus. 70; 70; 70; 70; 70 folding leaves. Five kwŏn in five vols. (of six). 8vo (254 x 177 mm.), orig. white paper wrappers with printed title-slips, orig. stitching. [Korea]: [late Chosŏn period].

One of two known copies of this anonymous Korean erotic book, which juxtaposes the vernacularized hagiography of Śākyamuni with hundreds of erotic prints showing all manners of sexual intercourse and masturbation, as well as related scenes of courtship and violence. To our knowledge, this is the only known example of a Korean woodblock-printed erotica. Not in WorldCat or KORCIS.

The prevailing cultural conservatism in Chosŏn Korea (1393-1910) meant that erotic pictures (K. chunhwa 春畫), when they finally emerged as an artistic genre in the late 18th century, tended to be painted sparingly for private collectors, rather than printed en masse for the marketplace as they were in the neighboring countries of China and Japan. Only a handful surviving painted erotic albums are known today, the most famous of which are the Kŏn’gon irhoe to 乾坤一會圖, attributed to Sin Yun-bok 申潤福 (1758-1813), and the Unu toch’ŏp 雲雨圖帖, attributed to Kim Hong-do 金弘道 (1745-1806). In the 2020 article “A Brief Comparison of Old Erotic Paintings in the Far East,” Won Whe Kim notes that “unlike China and Japan, no record of erotic woodcut paintings was found in Korea...[Korean erotic albums] were drawn privately by painters or amateurs and were hidden in the home of the collectors” (pp. 6-7).

As the editors of Korean Erotic Paintings (Seoul: 2001) point out, “[Korean erotic paintings] have either been lost or overlooked before historians could get their hands on them because they were considered obscene. That was due to Korea’s narrow-mindedness toward sex. The number of known erotic paintings is very little. It is difficult to do research on them because the ones with any artistic value are hidden in the homes of the collectors” (n.p.).

On the history of erotica in Korea, the editors further explain that “the origin of Korean erotic art can be found from the introduction of paintings from China’s Ming Dynasty. Eroticism in the late Chosŏn era was likely to have been under the influence of Chinese eroticism. However…eroticism was able to develop its originality. It broke away from being just copies of Chinese paintings and attained a style that reflected Chosŏn’s sex culture in a unique way...One of the main characteristics of Korean eroticism is that it realistically reveals the sexual customs of those times through its description of various social classes and situations” (n.p.).

The title of this woodblock-printed erotic album contains two references: the “flowery camp” (K. hwayŏng) is a well-known euphemism for the brothel (and sexual activities more generally), and the “biography of Śākyamuni” (K. sŏkpo) refers to the Wŏrin sŏkpo 月印釋譜, a 15th-century Korean translation of the Buddha’s biography and one of the first documents to be printed with the newly invented hangul alphabet. Our album contains 350 folding leaves bound into five volumes (in the Korean style, with five rather than four stitch-holes), each with a woodcut illustration on the recto and the mixed-script text of the Wŏrin sŏkpo on the verso. The faint polygonal lines around some illustrations suggest that they were carved on smaller blocks separate from the larger frame and its Wŏrin sŏkpo text, and those smaller blocks were either affixed to the larger blocks during printing or impressed separately onto the blank area after the text was printed. Regardless, the facing pages that result thus conjure and subvert a typical format of the genre’s Chinese and Japanese precedents, where erotic pictures are playfully paired with corresponding verses or literary excerpts. Additionally, the first illustration of each volume and some interior illustrations have printed “captions” that are fragmentary excerpts from the Wŏrin sŏkpo and other Buddhist texts, bearing no obvious relation — descriptive or satirical — to the image itself.

In contrast to the aforementioned painted albums that reflected the elevated style of renowned artists, the printed illustrations in this album are noticeably more rustic, if not sometimes comical. Figures and objects appear in monochrome sketches, with facial features and limbs traced out in minimal, sometimes distorted, lines. The stylistic rusticity of the album echoes its various settings and protagonists: sexual activity takes place not in decorated studios or a scenic landscape but within rural farmhouses or in the vicinity of villages; the figures involved are not well-dressed ladies or esteemed officials but ordinary men and women who labored in the fields, common soldiers who arrive on horseback, and rural gentry without official positions. The female figures always wear a simple knot bun (K. tchok) that signaled their status as common married women, rather than the elaborate wigs (K. ŏnjŭn mŏri) or adolescent braids (K. taenggi mŏri) worn by courtesans in painted albums. Men with headwear that suggests elevated status appear mostly in plot illustrations (see below), and they almost always wear a top knot (K. sangt’u) during the sexual activities. These stylistic and thematic features suggest that this album was produced during the 19th century when, as the editors of Korean Erotic Paintings point out, erotica was increasingly produced and consumed by people across all social strata, and the refined genre painting of earlier times gave way to simpler and popular styles. (See also 이태호, “조선후기 춘화의 발달과 퇴조,” p. 807.)

An impressive variety of sexual activities is depicted across the work’s 350 illustrations, including scenes of seduction (initiated by both men and women), dressing and undressing, voyeurism, rope bondage, vaginal and oral intercourse in every imaginable position and location, heterosexual intercourse and female masturbation with objects (dusting wand, tree, carrot), bestiality (women with fish, dog, mouse), fellatio and cunnilingus, and threesomes (two men with a woman, two women with a man). The occasional depiction of figures enjoying the sight of copulating animals references a recurring motif in earlier Korean erotic paintings.

While typical East Asian erotic albums consisted of isolated images without plot or recurring figures, this album is somewhat unusual in that it contains longer sequences of illustrations that seem to constitute coherent narratives, although the absence of any verbal description makes the stories quite difficult to discern. In the first volume, certain short sequences of images appear to be connected: in one image, an undressing woman sitting outside is approached by an enthusiastic dog, and in the next image the two engage in sexual intercourse. But starting from the third volume, longer sequences of images feature recurring, identifiable characters and somewhat legible plot lines. For example, at the beginning of Vol. III, soldiers bearing swords capture a village woman and convince her (depicted in a “bubble”) that her lover has been arrested. She is then carried away, it is implied, to be raped by one of the soldiers. Her lover later returns and watches her bathe through a window, and the two — fully dressed — share a romantic moment atop a hill, only for the soldiers to reappear and, after a brief conflict, capture the woman again while her lover protests. Such longer narrative sequences, including scenes such as literati drinking parties and official courts in addition to intercourse, thus ingeniously weave the erotic life of commoners into their broader social and political lives, substantially enriching the erotic album itself.

As mentioned above, this erotic album belongs to a genre within late Chosŏn popular culture of which few examples are known and about which very little has been written in any language. We refrain here from further conjecturing the significance of the very peculiar image-text pairing in the album or attempting to analyze the complexity of the longer narrative sequences. What is clear is that expert research into these problems will shed light not only on the album itself but also on a long-overlooked aspect of Korean cultural history.

The only other copy of this title we find is part of the Taegokhŏn collection gifted by Yi Chŏng-dong to the Yulgok Institute of Korean Studies (item #93 in 원주 대곡헌, published by 율곡연구원 in 2024), which contains an additional sixth volume.

Very good set, with some discoloration and spotting in Vols. III and IV and light worming in the final volume.

❧ 원주 대곡헌 (율곡연구원: 2024), #93. On Korean erotica, see also 이태호, “조선후기 춘화의 발달과 퇴조,” 역사학연구 11 (1997), pp. 783-810. 韓國의 春畫 (미술사랑: 2001). Won Whe Kim, “A brief comparison of old erotic paintings in the Far East,” Korean Journal of Sexual Health 4, no. 1 (2020), pp. 3-8. 서윤정, “조선후기 춘화(春畵): 젠더적 관점에서 본 경계와 차별, 재현을 둘러싼 문제,” 미술사학보, No. 58 (2022): pp. 131-55.