Tigers that want transformation and humans
The first story on human and tiger is found in the Dangun legend. A tiger prayed to become human. It was asked to endure eating only garlic and staying out of the sunlight for 100 days, but it gave up and could not become a human. Why couldn’t the tiger take off its skin?  In a traditional fairytale, I won’t eat you if you give me a piece of cake, a tiger disguised as a man appears. Children make sure their mother is not a tiger by checking the skin on the back of the hand. The tiger that could not become a human and the tiger that could not deceive humans. They wore their tiger skins.

Humans embracing with tigers appearing as others
Appearing in the Hanging Painting of a Mountain Spirit (Songgwangsa, 1858) is a mountain spirit with a gentle smile sitting on a tiger. The tiger looks stately with glaring blue eyes and a coiled-up tale in diagonal symmetry. A mountain spirit often emerges with a tiger probably because it’s a metaphor for dominating power. The tiger refers to threat, protection and fortune. It is not enough to depict the tiger as threatening, and thus it is revived as a positive charm. In Portrait of Jo Yeong-bok (ca. 1725), Jin Jae-hae - a top portrait painter during the reign of King Sukjong in the Joseon Dynasty – paints a tiger skin instead of a tiger. A tiger skin is draped on the chair Jo Yeong-bok sits in. The tiger skin’s ornamental quality signifies its duplicity, authority and protection. Chairs draped with a tiger skin were widely applied to Joseon’s full-length portraits. Joseon painters favored the tiger skin.

Sumptuous tiger skins appropriated
A Furious Tiger under a Pine Tree (19c, coloring on silk) is a joint work in which Kim Hong-do depicted a tiger and Gang Se-hwang portrayed a pine tree. Influenced by the Western painting technique imported during his time, Kim Hong-do produced tiger paintings with a cubic shading technique. His delicate depictions of tiger skins were remarkable. A tiger appears in the same format in folk paintings like Magpie and Tiger from the late Joseon period. Delicate renditions found in Kim Hong-do’s tiger painting disappeared but tigers in folk paintings done by anonymous painters maintained the meaning of the tiger as symbol of good fortune. Why does such a tiger reemerge in modern times? That is the return of a tiger skin. Mainstream design today employs the motifs of animal skins such as zebra, leopard, giraffe, and tiger. Tiger skin patterns are used widely nowadays. It is pervasive in costume, bedclothes, and accessories with luxuries. The tiger skin of a tiger is broken down into parts and the creative image of the tiger skin patterns is decorated with splendid attraction

Hybridity in artist Jeong Hae-jin’s tiger skin patterns
Why does artist Jeong Hae-jin depict tiger skin patterns? Her work is meticulous as well as cheerful. It demands an intricate explanation. Jeong’s work is characterized by a strong magnetism capturing the eye, a representation of power with dual meanings (threat and protection), design-like reproductivity through modern appropriation, the time of applying jinchae (real pigment, thick and opaque coloring), and minuteness. Her tiger skins conveying different meanings long for their continuity through crossbreeding. Her patterns are not completely breakdown, but yesterday’s continuousness. This makes the originality of tiger skin recognize and is able to transform oneself into new art world.
The tiger skin may be the subject matter that becomes one in body and soul for the artist who dreams of fusing work with the flavor of silk and jinchae and work with modern refinement. The tiger skin patterns expand to not only tiger’ segments, but flowers, bodies, apples, and trees, transcending species. This is Jeong’ original system of art work. Where will she go to dream with her tiger skin patterns holding grand events.

By Kim Jung-hyun, Art Critic