Nudity and pornography

The Chinese call pornography “chungong,” meaning a spring place in Chinese. Chungong is where the Chinese crown prince lived. Chungong pictures were drawn to give the prince sex education. Koreans and Japanese call erotic images "chunhwa," meaning a spring picture in both Korean and Japanese. Both chungong and chunhwa depict people having sex or sexual organs. Naked bodies in traditional painting in Northeast Asia always had to do with sexual intercourse. Nude pictures originated from the West. Art historian Kenneth Clark said nudity is an art form created by Greeks in the 5th century B.C. just as opera is an art form created in the 17th century in Italy.

Seiki Kuroda, the father of Japan`s modern painting who studied in France, drew and exhibited in 1895 “Morning Toilette,” in which a naked woman trims her hair in front of a mirror. This was the first Japanese nude picture to be displayed in public. Though Japanese at the time saw many chunhwas through Ukiyoe, a Japanese woodblock print, Kuroda’s picture sparked heated controversy. Chunhwas are supposed to be seen secretly, but the picture was on display under the name of a nude picture. This embarrassed the Japanese at the time.

The outspoken Chinese artist Ai Weiwei is under investigation by the Chinese government for distributing pornographic pictures. The obscene photo in question is called "One Tiger, Eight Breasts," in which Ai and four women pose in the nude. Seventy Chinese netizens protested the investigation by posting naked pictures of themselves on a blog page titled “Listen, Chinese government: Nudity is not pornography.” A person in Hong Kong also supported Ai, saying, “I saw no pornography in Ai’s nude picture.”

In the mid-19th century, Edouard Manet also created uproar in Paris’ art scene with his pictures “Olympia” and “The Luncheon on the Grass.” People of this age will not understand why those pictures created such a disturbance in the past. Gustave Courbet drew “The Origin of the World” in 1866 that realistically describes a woman’s sexual organ. What is important is not that Courbet drew the picture 150 years ago, but that the picture was on display in 1995 at the Orsay Museum in Paris. The boundary between nudity and pornography is constantly changing. The pace of change has grown much faster.

Editorial Writer Song Pyeong-in (pisong@donga.com)