How to Study Korean Folk Painting (Minhwa) for Your Art Practice

Korean folk painting, or minhwa (민화), is one of the most tempting subjects a Korean applicant can bring to a US art school portfolio. It is visually strong, instantly recognisable and clearly personal. That is also why it so often goes wrong. A tiger and a magpie dropped into a contemporary illustration, or a peony screen redrawn in brighter colours, tells an admissions reader only that the applicant knows what minhwa looks like. It says nothing about what the applicant has learned from it.

This guide is about the part that usually gets skipped: studying Korean folk painting before using it. It covers what the tradition actually is, how its images carry meaning, where to see good examples in Korea and in the United States, how to copy for learning without breaking admissions rules, and how to turn that study into original work. Every factual claim below has been checked against a museum, an encyclopedia or a school’s own admissions page. Where a source could not be confirmed, we say so.

The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture, published by the Academy of Korean Studies, defines minhwa as popular, practical painting made according to traditional customs of daily life. The key word is practical. These were not pictures made for contemplation in a collector’s study. They were folding screens for weddings and birthdays, sehwa (세화) — New Year pictures meant to ward off misfortune and invite good luck — and paintings pasted onto walls and doors. According to the same encyclopedia, they decorated the royal household, government offices, ordinary homes and temples alike.

Who painted them is less tidy than the romantic image suggests. The encyclopedia describes a range that runs from trained painters of the royal Bureau of Painting (도화서) to ordinary people, including itinerant painters who travelled between rural markets and villages. Most surviving works are unsigned; museums such as The Met list the maker simply as “unidentified artist”. The tradition is associated above all with the late Joseon period, and the encyclopedia’s entries on individual genres place their spread in the eighteenth and especially the nineteenth centuries.

The word itself has a history worth knowing. According to the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture, the first person to use the term “minhwa” was the Japanese critic Yanagi Sōetsu, who described these as pictures born among the people, painted for them and bought by them. Korean scholars have since offered competing definitions of what the term should cover. For a student, the lesson is simple: “folk painting” is a later label placed on a body of work, not a name its makers gave themselves. Using it carefully is already a sign of study.

The most common mistake in writing about minhwa is to present it as the naive opposite of refined court art. The historical record does not support such a clean line. Several of the best-known minhwa genres began at court and travelled outward.

Chaekgeori is the clearest case. The Cleveland Museum of Art notes that these bookshelf screens borrowed European techniques of trompe l’oeil and chiaroscuro, and that the genre lasted from the late eighteenth into the early twentieth century. Its museum holds a ten-panel chaekgeori screen by the court painter Yi Taek-gyun (accession 2011.37). A student who studies chaekgeori is therefore studying a genre that absorbed foreign pictorial ideas, served a king’s taste and then became a household good — a far more interesting story than “traditional folk art”.

Before drawing anything, learn the main families of images. The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture groups minhwa into auspicious paintings, paintings built around words or objects, animal and bird paintings, and landscapes. The table below organises the genres a student is most likely to meet.

Minhwa works as a visual vocabulary: an object on the screen stands for a word, a wish or a virtue. That is what makes it useful to study, especially for students heading into illustration, graphic design or communication design, where images routinely have to carry meaning quickly.

• The leaping carp. The carp jumping the Dragon Gate stands for passing the civil-service examination. The encyclopedia describes it as passing through a difficult gate to rise in the world — the origin of the word 등용문.
• The peony. Wealth and honour. The Met’s essay on chaekgeori notes the same meaning, alongside the characters 福 and 壽 for good fortune and longevity.
• The magpie. Good news.
• The tiger. Protection against evil. In tiger-and-magpie paintings, the encyclopedia also records a satirical reading: the tiger as corrupt officialdom and the magpie as ordinary people. The genre was sometimes paired with a dragon as a New Year picture.
• The characters. In munjado, each character contains related images. The encyclopedia notes, for instance, that the character for filial piety (효) includes the carp and bamboo shoots from well-known filial stories. It also records regional styles from Gangwon, Andong and Jeju.

In Korea

• National Museum of Korea — collection search on the museum website and the e-museum database of public collections.
• National Folk Museum of Korea — its online collection search is a good starting point for household paintings and screens.
• Gahoe Museum (가회민화박물관) — a museum devoted to minhwa in Bukchon, Seoul, founded in 2002. Check opening days before visiting.
• Exhibitions — the Amorepacific Museum of Art in Seoul held “Beyond Joseon Minhwa” from 27 March to 29 June 2025, with more than 100 works borrowed from 19 institutions.

In the United States

For students already at school in the United States, this matters: a museum visit and a page of sketchbook notes made in front of an actual screen are worth more than dozens of images downloaded from a search engine. Scale, the texture of the surface and the way a folding screen reads across its panels do not survive reproduction.

Reading list

The 2016–17 exhibition deserves a note. It opened at Stony Brook University’s Charles B. Wang Center (29 September to 23 December 2016), travelled to the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas (15 April to 11 June 2017), and ended at the Cleveland Museum of Art (5 August to 5 November 2017). It placed historical screens beside contemporary artists who work with the chaekgeori tradition — the clearest model a student could want of how the past and the present can share a wall.

The method below is designed so that each stage leaves something usable: notes, a symbol map, copy studies and, finally, original work. It can be done over a school term alongside other portfolio pieces.

Pass 1 — Look and diagram

Choose one work, ideally one you can see in person. Before copying anything, draw a quick structural diagram: how the panels divide the picture, where the eye enters, how space is flattened or tilted, where the densest detail sits. Chaekgeori is especially rewarding here because it mixes shelving that reads as three-dimensional with objects that do not obey a single viewpoint. Write down what you notice in plain sentences.

Pass 2 — Map the symbols

List every element in the painting and, next to it, the meaning you can support with a source. Leave a blank where you cannot find one rather than guessing. This page is the single best evidence that your interest is real, and it is exactly the kind of process material that belongs in a sketchbook or supplementary section.

Pass 3 — Copy to learn (임모)

Copying a master work is an old and legitimate way of learning, in Korea as in the European academies — the Bargue plates are the Western equivalent (see our guide to Bargue drawing exercises). Copy a section, not the whole screen: a single peony, a carp, one shelf. Pay attention to line weight, the order in which colour is built up, and how outlines hold flat colour. The encyclopedia records that minhwa was made on silk and paper with colour pigments; if you work with hanji and traditional pigments, treat the material itself as part of what you are studying. Label each copy clearly with the title, collection and “copy study”.

Pass 4 — Change one variable

Original work begins when you change something on purpose. Keep the grammar and replace one element: the subject, the medium, the scale or the context. The genres themselves suggest directions. Chaekgeori is, in the words of the 2016–17 exhibition title, about the pleasure of possessions — what would an inventory of your own shelves say about you? Munjado turns words into pictures — which words would you choose, and what images would live inside them? The tiger and magpie were already political satire — what does power look like where you live? These are prompts, not formulas; the point is that the question comes from the tradition rather than from its surface.

This is where many well-intended minhwa portfolios run into trouble. Several leading art schools state plainly that copied work does not belong among the finished pieces of an application.

The practical consequence is clear. A faithful copy of a minhwa screen, however skilful, should not be submitted as a finished portfolio piece. It can appear as process — in a sketchbook page, alongside the original work it led to, and labelled as a study. The finished pieces must be your own compositions.

There is a second consequence. Pratt asks for several works drawn from direct observation, and RISD strongly recommends drawing from observation rather than from imagination or photographs. Minhwa study cannot replace that requirement; it sits next to it. A portfolio that is all flat, symbolic colour will look narrow. One that pairs strong observational drawing with a thoughtful minhwa-derived series shows range.

Minhwa is not a forgotten art waiting to be rediscovered. In Korea it is a popular practice: The Korea Herald reported in 2020 that minhwa colouring books had become a popular pastime, and adult classes in folk painting are easy to find. Professional artists also work with the tradition. Kyoungtack Hong’s “Library” series refers to late-Joseon bookshelf screens, and the Cleveland Museum of Art cites his Library 3 (1995–2001). Seongmin Ahn’s 2020 exhibition at the Korean Cultural Center New York was titled “MINHWA & minhwa: Korean Folk Paintings in Dialogue With the Contemporary”. Artists including Stephanie S. Lee appeared in the 2016–17 chaekgeori tour.

For an applicant, this raises the bar rather than lowering it. Using minhwa is not in itself distinctive; many people do it. What remains distinctive is a clear, personal reason for using it and evidence of real study. That is precisely what the four passes above are designed to produce.

Most undergraduate portfolios ask for somewhere between 8 and 20 pieces, depending on the school. Within that, a minhwa-derived body of work usually works best as a short series of two or three related pieces, supported by process pages, rather than as a single isolated image or as the whole portfolio. A series shows that you followed an idea through; process pages show where it came from.

1. One sketchbook spread with a structural diagram and a symbol map (Passes 1 and 2).
2. One page of copy studies, clearly labelled (Pass 3).
3. Two or three finished original works that change one variable of the tradition (Pass 4).
4. A two-sentence description for each finished work: what you took from minhwa, and what you changed.

Related Korean traditions can deepen the series. Ink wash painting offers a counterpoint of line and emptiness to minhwa’s saturated colour (Korean ink wash techniques), and dancheong shows how pattern and colour worked in architecture (dancheong patterns in contemporary design). For long-term planning, a sustained study like this fits best when started early — see our grade-by-grade portfolio timeline and how to structure a 100-day drawing challenge.

Start small: one screen, one page of notes, one copy study. If the interest holds after that, the tradition will give you more than a subject — it will give you a way of thinking about how images carry meaning. That is what an admissions reader is looking for.

Sources: Encyclopedia of Korean Culture (민화, 세화, 책가도, 모란도, 십장생도, 약리도, 작호도, 문자도) · Cleveland Museum of Art · The Metropolitan Museum of Art · LACMA · Peabody Essex Museum · Stony Brook University · Spencer Museum of Art · Amorepacific · Korean Cultural Center New York · The Korea Herald · admissions pages of Pratt, SVA, SAIC, Parsons and RISD. Checked 30 September 2026.