Dancheong -- a discussion of aesthetic principals but no actual definition of the word 'dancheong'
Created | Updated May 27, 2007
This page aims to describe the basic 'rules' of dancheong decoration and to show how they work together. It also enumerates quite a few dancheong-related terms.
This page is written and posted in full awareness that nobody outside the Korean-speaking world gives a good gosh darn.
As for what dancheong actually is, where it is used and so on, I think it would simply be going too far to explain that. The curious reader is referred to Google, which in turn will refer the curious reader to my site. Unless I get around to making a wikipedia article about it.
Basic Principles
The basic rules of dancheong:
- Every part of the wood surface must be covered. The primary purpose of the dancheong is to protect the wood. Correspondingly, nothing that is not wood is part of the dancheong.
- For reasons of allegory and ceremony, there are five basic colors, corresponding to the five elements. In practise, there's a vast range of exceptions to this rule. Nevertheless, there's a level on which it all comes down to five colors.
- The important elements are beams, not flat surfaces. Flat surfaces tended to be much more disposable and short-lived in traditional Korean wood architecture.
- The most important part of the beam is the end of the beam -- this is the part that most needs to be protected.
Notice how everything on this list is dictated by the job of the dancheong, i.e. to protect the beams and to indicate the role of the building within the rather rigid Korean philosophy.
As with all the best systems of expression, the dancheong's aesthetic qualities arose as side effects.
An important thing to remember when looking at dancheong is that theoretically, it's the whole outer surface of the beam, not just one side of it, that is being decorated -- even if the beam happens to have flat sides. The pattern may therefore appear incomplete or off-center from the point of view of a particular surface.
Element by Element
Not all the elements available in dancheong necessarily occur in a given building.
The End of the Beam
The flat end of the beam is the most important part to paint, because it's where water is likely to enter the beam and where cracks will appear. Because of this, even buildings that don't really have dancheong (such as many Confucian schools, or the outbuildings of Buddhist temples) still paint the ends of beams white under the eaves.
In dancheong-decorated buildings, the small size and relative fragility of the very end of the beam tends to keep decoration simple. Round beams almost invariable have a stylised orange lotus flower on. 'Ox tongues', the beams that hold up the edges of the eaves and corner brackets, tend to be black with a stylised Chinese character drawn in white lines. The ends of large beams may be painted a single color, or may have naturalistic or symbolic painting on.
Around the Beam End: Meoricho
Having decorated the flat face of the beam, we move to the most important part of dancheong -- the meoricho, the decoration that goes around the beam at either end.
Saek-sil
The saek-sil is a group of stripes, usually dark, or a dark band with dots on. It separates the more colorful parts of the dancheong from the end of the beam.
Meoricho
The meoricho is the main motif of the beam-end, usually based on a lotus or other flower. Because the general idea in dancheong is that a pattern goes round the beam, there's often two half-meorichos, or a whole meoricho and two half-meorichos.
There are a lot of different meoricho patterns possible.
Hwi
The hwi comes next. It's a series of brightly colored bands, often wavy or interlocking, that lead from the meoricho into the body of the beam. It tends to look like a 'wave' pattern but students of Korean language will realize that it's actually a 'feather' pattern.
If 'hwi' were romanized in the standard way, it would be 'heui', but much as I love new-style romanization I think readers would have trouble with that.
The Body of the Beam
While the meoricho decorates the ends of a beam, there are several choices for the middle part.
Bidanmuneui
This is the pattern that occurs in the main, middle part of the beam. In Buddhist architecture it's very common and forms an important part of the decoration. In non-Buddist buildings it's rare.
Bidanmuni are generally geometric patterns of interlocking bars and/or rings, having a sixfold symmetry. They are probably borrowed from decorative patterns used in screens and furniture -- Korea has a rich tradition of wooden screen patterns which often use triangular or hexagonal elements that closely resemble bidanmuni, and this in turn is generally based on Chinese decoration (as opposed to the probably North Asian origins of the other aspects of dancheong).
The colors of bidanmuni are generally chosen so as to have a certain relationship with the colors of the meoricho and the base color of the dancheong -- they are often dark reds or deep purples because these colors don't appear in the more standard dancheong elements. These deep colors would easily appear murky, so as with the rest of dancheong, black outlining and black center-lines are used to make the shapes appear crisper and bolder.
The body of the beam may occasionally be filled with patterns derived from damasked silks, rather than with solid-looking geometric patterns.
Dandokmuneui
The body of the beam may contain a single motif, such as a flower, auspicious herb, or geometric shape. This is called 'dandokmuni'.
Byeoljihwa
The body may also be filled with naturalistic designs -- in the case of secular buildings, landscapes and plants figure highly. In the case of Buddhist buildings scenes from the sutras or boddisatvas may be seen, but there is no strongly-defined system and the purpose remains mainly decorative rather than polemic -- so much so that amusing scenes from everyday life may be substituted.
Because the colors of dancheong are based on the five elements and thus also on the four directions, byeoljihwa may be chosen based on which direction the wall in question is facing -- for instance, there may be representations of the animals that correspond to each direction.
Flat Surfaces
Flat surfaces, as mentioned above, don't have much to do in dancheong, and murals painted on the walls between the pillars may not be strictly considered part of the dancheong. In very elaborate late-period Buddhist buildings, the pattern of the beam body is often extended to the flat wooden panels between the beams.
Taeguk (the red and blue round symbol that occurs in the middle of the Korean flag) may also appear on the panels between columns, in which case the bulk of the panel will generally be painted a plain color.
Eaves and Brackets
The eaves and corner-brackets of traditional Korean wood buildings can become extremely complicated and the idea of a single beam as decorative element can be lost because there are so many complicated wooden elements in the construction.
Sometimes the wooden components are decorated as if they were very short and complicated beams, with meoricho and hwi.
Because this can be rather overwhelming, there are also simplified patterns used only on brackets. These often involve painting the bracket in a base color, and then drawing long, plant-like forms over that in black, white, or the 'upper' base color. In rare cases, some places might be left unpainted in order to reduce the dazzling effect of the dancheong.
Levels of Dancheong
Some buildings are more dancheong than others. Dancheongs may be divided into various levels based on elaborateness. Almost invariably, the more complex levels are the more recent.
This section looks at the five basic types -- there are many more gradations based on complexity, age, and purpose.
Gachil Dancheong
Gachil dancheong is characterized by each beam being painted one color. This is the simplest possible kind of dancheong and also the oldest. Even so, the colors of beams are still chosen carefully relative to other beams.
Geutgi Dancheong
In geutgi dancheong, lines are drawn on the base color in black and white.
Moro Dancheong
Moro dancheong has a meoricho and could be considered the 'standard' level of dancheong.
Geummoro Dancheong
Geummoro dancheong has dandongmuni or byeoljihwa as well as meoricho, and is generally more elaborate and uses more colors.
Geum Dancheong
Geom ('gold') dancheong is the most elaborate possible dancheong, having bidanmuni and other patterns on most beams and even in the spaces between beams.
Despite the name, gold need not actually be used. When it is used (usually on more recent buildings -- the campanile of the Seokguram grotto in Gyeongju springs to mind) gold basically does a similar job to white in the arrangement of the dancheong.
Aesthetics
Basic Color System
Dancheong is theoretically concerned with the five colors that correspond to the five elements:
- Red
- Yellow
- Blue
- Black
- White
In practise, however, many colors have special roles and relationships.
Upper and Lower Base Colors
Dancheong generally have two base colors -- a dark red-brown for the pillars and the lower 80% of the building, and a turquiose green for the upper part of the walls, the heads of the pillars, and the eaves.
This is because the lower walls are generally in bright sunlight, whereas the eaves are under the shadow of the roof. The choice of a warm color in the lower walls and a cool color in the shadows serves to dramatically emphasise the effect of the light. This opposition of warm and cool elements in order to dramatize the physical structure is absolutely essential to the aesthetics of dancheong.
Although the color most associated with dancheong is the turqoise upper base color, it doesn't actually have to be present at all. The upper base color can be made the same as the lower one, and actual blue, rather than turquoise, has sometimes been used.
Black and White
Except perhaps in some very old designs, large areas of black and white are never found in dancheong. These two colors are instead reserved for special use: black is mostly for making dividing lines between the other colors, and white is used for lines and dots.
Because dancheong is so complicated, and because the greatest complexity occurs where the dark building is likely to be seen against the bright sky, it's very important to prevent all the colors from just melting into an impenetrable visual mess. Black outlines help keep the colors distinct, and the white lines and dots give focus where there would otherwise be nowhere to rest the eye.
A good example of this latter effect is the pair of white dots sometimes seen on the 'hwi' (see above); these dots give the observer a starting point from which to understand where the hwi begins and ends.
Color Temperature
Dancheong colors are often chosen to alternate sharply between warm and cold. The sequence of sil, meoricho, and hwi generally provides good examples of this. Within the meoricho itself there is generally a warm center, such as an orange lotus flower, and a cooler surrounding area.
Depth
Dancheong patterns, being painted, are flat, but it is always important to remember that they are decorating solid beams, not flat surfaces. To make the already complicated structure of a traditional wooden building seem even more involving and imposing, dancheong frequently use techniques of pseudo-3d.
Most obviously, the byeoljihwa patterns involve interlocking bars which give the impression of a grating or screen rather than of a solid panel.
Within individual stripes of color of a given hue, there are frequently both dark and light versions of the color. Particularly in the bidanmuni and hwi, this gives the stripes a sense of depth and overlap that they would not otherwise have. Because of this effect, the number of actual colors in a dancheong is usually at least twice the number of theoretical or symbolic colors.
This idea of a dark and light version of each color is the only thing dancheong has in common with the Commodore 64.
Finally, even without the use of shading or interlocking, dancheong patterns always have a very strong sense of foreground and background. The beam end patterns are 'foreground' relative to the byeoljihwa or the plain body of a beam; the sil and hwi are 'foreground' relative to the meoricho; and the colored tops of pillars are 'foreground' relative to the bodies of pillars (which are usually in red-brown, the lower base color).
Conclusion
It's impossible to give much idea of the complexity of dancheong in a single short article. How much more impossible it is to convey the actual visual effect! Unfortunately, dancheong is inherently rather difficult to describe verbally, and the reader is referred to their nearest Joseon period temple for further study.
A few of my favorite dancheongs, in the form of huge giant images that take a long time to load.
