Appearance of a woman reproduced by Korea’s modern painting circles’ interior woman’s seated image, such as ‘Woman’s Reading Painting’ or ‘Mother & Child Painting’ has something to do with the woman policy called ‘Good Wife and Wise Mother’ of modern countries. Such subjects expressed the new woman as a new main agent borne by the woman education in modern times on the whole, showing that a subject of a new woman was handled as a symbol speaking for the new and the modern while following up the tradition of the picture of a beauty the so-called “Beautiful Woman.” Such a female figure painting produced by male painters had been steadily maintained until the 1970s under the criticism of ‘Realization of Woman’s Image which becomes the other.’
The paper intended to trace the aspects where the strong modern planning for a woman called ‘Good Wife and Wise Mother’ stretched out in a specific life of a woman of through women painters’ life and art, such as Chun, Kyung-ja, and Rah, Hye-seok. There obviously exists a myth of a beautiful woman replete with cultured beauty and classical beauty achieved by a female figure painting represented by ‘a woman’s seated image’ in modern painting circles, but ‘Good Wife and Wise Mother’ in the eyes of women painters wasn’t all of modern itinerary towards the newness. Particularly, the absence of men, who are essential cooperators to the modern project of ‘Good Wife and Wise Mother’ sparked women to throw endless questions about something modern (something new), causing them to make a challenge for modernity, and consequently reaching the level of establishing of feminist world of art works by eliciting awakening and experience on woman’s own and making works through them.
Amongst them, Rah, Hye-seok exposed the modern circumstance where a woman is a discriminative existence, and as a consequence, she took priority of the position as a feminist artist by making the process of perceiving the discrimination as a difference into a work. Chun, Kyung-ja established the image of a thinking, introspective woman by doing experiment on the coordinate of a unique woman of a ‘Girl’ who wasn’t switched to a citizen of a modern country. Like this, the woman’s image established by the two female painters resulted from replying, in a woman’s voice, to ‘the woman in a wise and virtuous family, which the nation in the modern period called a woman. Thanks to their works, women’s space in the modern painting circles, which treated women monolithically and oppressively, could be expanded a little more plentifully.