A life whose years, unusually, can be named

Few people in Korean history, the writer says, are remembered as widely as Shin Saimdang. Interest runs from children’s biographies to scholarly work, and it grew again when she was chosen as the first woman to appear on a banknote. The notes give no year for that choice, and none is supplied here.

She lived only about fifty years, yet memory of her has lasted five centuries. Two facts feed the story: she was a painter, and she was the mother of Yi I, known as Yulgok. The writer does not think those facts, on their own, explain her fame. A fact does not become a truth just by being recorded.

Unlike most women of the traditional period, who left almost no trace, her dates are fairly sure. She was born in Gangneung in 1504, in the tenth year of King Yeonsan, the second of five daughters of Shin Myeong-hwa and a mother of the Yongin Yi family. She married Yi Won-su in 1522, in the seventeenth year of King Jungjong, and had four sons and three daughters. She died in Seoul in 1551, in the sixth year of King Myeongjong, at forty-eight. Until she settled in her husband’s Seoul house at thirty-eight, she spent nearly twenty years after marriage mainly in Gangneung, travelling also to Paju and Bongpyeong.

Painter and mother, and a name that is made

Being a painter made her motherhood stand out; being Yulgok’s mother made the paintings stand out. That double role, the writer says, sets her apart from other women who shone in Joseon. Even so, without later work that gave the sources a meaning, she would not have been remembered as the wise mother and good wife, or as a symbol of motherhood.

Who she is depends on how she is remembered, and that is a question of how she has been told. The speaker, the subject, the intention and the manner of telling have all changed her face. Truth, in this reading, is an effect of discourse produced through knowledge and power.

Korean society, the writer adds, has allowed women a place in public life to a degree, yet the ideal of the wise mother and good wife still governs many lives. Saimdang’s image moves with the politics of the day: at one moment a woman artist, at another a model wife and mother, according to what that society asks of women.

From a painter named Shin to a national mother

One kind of study, the notes say, takes the received story as given and treats Saimdang as a fixed essence. That work has trouble seeing how the talk itself changed with the times. Another kind, represented here by Yi Suk-in and Kim Su-jin, reads those changes as politics.

Yi Suk-in follows a sixteenth-century woman recast over four centuries: from a painter, Madam Shin, into a bearer of wifely virtue and motherhood. In the seventeenth century, Song Si-yeol, needing to raise Yi I, recast her as a virtuous Madam Shin. In the eighteenth, Noron figures likened her to Madam Hou, mother of Li Jing of the Northern Song, and held her up as the mother of the sage Yulgok. By the nineteenth she had been remade as a figure of motherhood everyone was to look up to.

Kim Su-jin follows the story from the late Joseon and colonial years through to 1970. In the patriotic enlightenment period she appeared as one model of the educated woman; late in the colonial mobilisation, as a ‘mother of the militarist state.’ She then faded, and from the 1960s into the 1970s, under a project of national revival, she was brought back as a ‘Korean-style wise mother and good wife’ — a tradition, the notes argue, invented under the state’s lead. Those years stay in that frame.

The same Korean essay, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. A student essay on Shin Saimdang, the discourse around her, and the roles later ages asked of women.
2. Joseon dates as given in the notes: birth in 1504, marriage in 1522, death in 1551. Those years stay in that frame.
3. Readings drawn in the notes from Yi Suk-in and Kim Su-jin, including the recasting through the 1960s and 1970s. No year is given for her appearance on a banknote.

Last updated: 14 November 2026