Artist name (East Asia)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Artist names ( Chinese  號  /  号 , Pinyin hào ; Japanese : gō ; Korean : ho ; Vietnamese : hiệu ) are names for the pseudonym of artists from East Asia . The term and the idea of ​​using an artist name for works originally came from China and was quickly adopted by artists and writers in other East Asian countries, primarily in Japan and Korea .

Some artists took on several artist names in the course of their lives. In some of these cases the names marked different periods in their lives or careers. So took Tang Yin from the Chinese Ming Dynasty more than ten artists name. In Japan, the ukiyo-e artist Katsushika Hokusai is a typical example, as he used six different artist names in the period from 1798 to 1806 alone.

Schools and artist titles

China's well-known poet Li Bai from the Tang Dynasty in the 8th century AD was the first to use this form of the pseudonym.

In Japan during the Edo period , the woodcut artists of the Ukiyo-e as well as the artists of other styles received their first stage name (Gō) from their respective teacher, this Gō usually containing a character from the Gō of the teacher. So was Hokusai's first stage name Shunrō, the character shun comes from the name of his master Katsukawa Shunshō .

In this way it is easy to establish the relationships between the artists, especially because in the later years, especially in the Utagawa School, it became a custom to make the first syllable in the name of the student correspond to the last syllable in the name of the master . For example, the well-known landscape artist Utagawa Hiroshige had a master with the Go Utagawa Toyohiro .

Outside of the renowned painting schools of Kanō and Tosa , it was unusual in Japan to add the name of the school to the artist name. Often, however, other artist names given by the artist were added to the first; z. B. Utagawa Kunisada signed his work for a long time, among other things with "Gototei Kunisada" or with "Kōchōrō Kunisada".

literature

  • Louis Frédéric: Japan Encyclopedia. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 2002, ISBN 978-0674007703 .
  • Friedrich B. Schwan: Handbook Japanese Woodcut. Backgrounds, techniques, themes and motifs . Iudicium, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-89129-749-1 , p. 226.