All Thinkers

Sin Saimdang

Sin Saimdang was a Korean artist, calligrapher, poet, and Confucian scholar of the mid-Joseon period. She is widely regarded as the most accomplished female artist of the Joseon dynasty (1392-1910) and one of the most celebrated women in Korean history. She has been the first woman depicted on a South Korean banknote (the 50,000 won note, issued from June 2009). Her real personal name was Sin In-seon. 'Saimdang' was her pen name, taken from Tairen, the mother of King Wen of Zhou in classical Chinese tradition; her name signalled her aspiration to be like that exemplary figure. Her other pen names included Saim, Inimdang, and Imsajae. She was born on 29 October 1504 (5 December by the Western calendar) in Bukpyeong-chon village, Jukheon-ri, Gangneung, Gangwon Province, at her maternal grandparents' home (Ojukheon, still preserved as a historic site). Her father was Sin Myeong-hwa, a government official and friend of the reformist scholar Jo Gwang-jo, who chose not to be politically active during the factional struggles of his time. Her mother was Lady Yi. She was the eldest of five sisters; her parents had no sons. Her maternal grandfather, recognising her early talent, taught her as he would have taught a grandson: classical Chinese, history, philosophy, and the Confucian canon. She also developed exceptional skill in calligraphy, embroidery, and painting from childhood. At nineteen she married Yi Won-su, a man from a respectable but poor family. Her father had specifically chosen Yi because he was willing to let her continue her artistic work. The marriage produced eight children, five sons and three daughters. Her third son was Yi I (1536-1584), pen name Yulgok, who would become one of the two greatest Neo-Confucian philosophers in Korean history. Saimdang continued painting and writing throughout her marriage. She died of sudden illness in Pyongan region on 17 May 1551 at age 47.

Origin
Korea (Joseon)
Lifespan
1504-1551
Era
Mid-Joseon Korea (16th century)
Subjects
Korean Art Joseon Women Confucian Scholarship Calligraphy And Painting Korean Literature
Skills
Creative Expression Cultural Heritage And Identity Ethical Thinking Research Skills Emotional Intelligence
Why They Matter

Sin Saimdang matters for three reasons. First, she was a major artist whose work remains foundational to Korean visual tradition. Her paintings are known for their delicate beauty: insects, butterflies, grapes, orchids, flowers, fish, landscapes. She effectively initiated the chochungdo genre (paintings of plants and insects), which would be developed by later Korean artists for centuries. Some of her works survive and are designated National Treasures of South Korea. Her painting Mukpodo (Grapes in Ink), Chochungdo Subyeong (Embroidered Folding Screen of Plants and Insects, National Treasure No. 595), and others are still studied. The scholar Eo Sukgwon wrote in the sixteenth century that her paintings of grapes and landscapes were comparable to those of An Gyeon, the leading male court painter of the early Joseon. Few Joseon women had work preserved at all; her preservation reflects exceptional contemporary recognition.

Second, she lived as a serious Confucian scholar and intellectual at a time when Joseon society had begun systematically restricting women's public learning. Earlier Goryeo and very early Joseon women had retained more legal and cultural autonomy. By Saimdang's time, Neo-Confucian patriarchal norms were tightening. Her unusual education, made possible by her family's specific circumstances (no sons, supportive grandfather, willing husband), let her become what most Joseon women of her era could not. She wrote poetry, painted, and educated her own children including Yi I in the same Confucian classics she had mastered.

Third, her legacy has been intensely contested. After her death, her son Yi I memorialised her, and later Confucian writers gradually reframed her as a model 'wise mother' (eojin eomeoni) celebrated above all for nurturing the philosopher Yi I. Her own artistic and intellectual achievements were sometimes obscured by this maternal framing. The Park Chung-hee government (1961-1979) appropriated this reframed image to mobilise housewives for state developmentalism. Some Korean feminists criticised her appearance on the 50,000-won note in 2009 as reinforcing the same domestic stereotype. The contest over how to remember her continues. Recovering Saimdang as artist and scholar, alongside her role as mother, is still active work in Korean cultural memory.

Key Ideas
1
The Most Celebrated Joseon Woman Artist
2
An Unusual Education for a Joseon Woman
3
Mother of Yi I (Yulgok)
Key Quotations
"Talent alone will not make a good painting. One must first calm oneself, then carefully observe the object to be painted. If the object's true essence is not understood with certainty, the painting will lack vitality."
— Sin Saimdang, paraphrased from her advice to her children on painting, mid-16th century
Variations of this advice are recorded in the family tradition that her son Yi I (Yulgok) and his followers preserved. The wording above is a translation of one preserved version. The principle was direct. Talent matters but is not enough. Good painting requires inner calm and careful observation. Without grasping the actual essence of the subject, no amount of skill produces a living painting. The advice connects with a long East Asian aesthetic tradition emphasising the connection between inner cultivation and artistic excellence: the Chinese expression hsiu-yang or 'self-cultivation' was a Confucian and Daoist commonplace. Saimdang's specific application was practical and accessible. She was speaking to her own children about how to paint well. She gave them the principle she had used herself. For students, the line is a useful introduction to the East Asian tradition of art as a contemplative practice rather than just technique. Saimdang's paintings, with their patient observational care, embody the principle she taught.
"A daughter who has gone over the pass looks back at her aged mother, alone in the village. The wild geese fly south, but the daughter cannot follow them home."
— Sin Saimdang, paraphrased from Yu Daegwallyeong Mangchinjeong (Looking Back at My Parents' Home While Going Over Daegwallyeong Pass), c. 1530s
Variations of this image run through Saimdang's most famous surviving poem. The wording above is a paraphrase of the central image. The poem records the moment of crossing the Daegwallyeong Pass, the high mountain pass that separates her natal Gangneung from the inland Seoul region where her marriage required her to go. From the top of the pass she looked back at the village where her mother lived alone. The image of wild geese flying home while she could not return captured a feeling familiar to many Joseon women: the requirement to leave their natal families when married, often not to return for years. The grief was specific in Saimdang's case (her widowed mother had needed her, and Saimdang had returned to Gangneung repeatedly when she could) and general in resonance (most married Joseon women lived this experience in some form). For students, the poem is a useful example of how individual feeling and social pattern can come together in lyric form. Saimdang gave the experience words that have lasted nearly five hundred years.
Using This Thinker in the Classroom
Cultural Heritage and Identity When introducing students to Korean visual art tradition
How to introduce
Tell students that Sin Saimdang is widely regarded as the most accomplished female artist of the Joseon dynasty (1392-1910). She painted insects, butterflies, grapes, orchids, fish, and landscapes with delicate observational care. She effectively initiated the chochungdo genre (paintings of plants and insects) that Korean artists developed for centuries. Some of her works are designated South Korean National Treasures. Her face appears on the 50,000-won banknote. Discuss with students: many countries have foundational visual artists whose work shaped how their national art is understood. Saimdang is one of the cleanest cases of a woman occupying this role in pre-modern East Asia. Reading about her is part of understanding Korean visual tradition, which is often less internationally known than Chinese or Japanese traditions but is rich in its own right. The library already includes Hokusai for Japan and Frida Kahlo for Mexico; Saimdang adds Korean visual art.
Cultural Heritage and Identity When teaching students about exceptional women in restricted societies
How to introduce
Tell students that by Saimdang's time, Joseon Korea had begun strictly restricting women's public learning. Most Joseon girls received only basic domestic education. Saimdang received much more: classical Chinese, history, philosophy, and the Confucian canon. The reasons were specific. Her family had no sons. Her grandfather chose to teach her as he would a grandson. Her father chose a husband who would let her continue her work. Discuss with students: how do exceptional women in restrictive societies become possible? Usually through specific combinations of family circumstances and individual advocacy that override the broader restrictions. The pattern is recognisable across many cultures and centuries: Murasaki Shikibu in Heian Japan (already in library), Hildegard of Bingen in medieval Europe (already in library), Aphra Behn in Restoration England (already in library). Saimdang fits the pattern in fifteenth-century Korea. The exercise of paying attention to such circumstances is good practice for understanding how 'exceptional' figures actually emerge.
Creative Expression When teaching students about close observation in art
How to introduce
Tell students about Saimdang's advice to her children on painting: 'Talent alone will not make a good painting. One must first calm oneself, then carefully observe the object to be painted.' Show students images of her chochungdo paintings, which depict insects and plants with extraordinary observational care. Each butterfly is anatomically specific; each grape catches light a particular way. Discuss with students: what does close observation actually require? Time, stillness, attention, and a willingness to set aside what one already thinks one knows. The principle Saimdang taught is broadly East Asian (the Chinese tradition has many similar formulations) but applies far beyond. Many art and writing traditions have stressed the importance of observation. The exercise of taking observation seriously as a discipline, rather than treating it as automatic or trivial, is good practice for visual arts, writing, and any work that requires attention to actual things rather than just thinking about them.
Further Reading

For a first introduction in English, the Korea100 page on Sin Saimdang from the Academy of Korean Studies provides accessible biographical and artistic context. Google Arts & Culture has substantial material on her paintings. The Bank of Korea's documentation on the 50,000-won note design discusses her artistic legacy. The Ojukheon historic site museum (her birthplace, in Gangneung) maintains good online resources in Korean and partial English.

Key Ideas
1
Chochungdo: Plants, Insects, and Aesthetic Tradition
2
The Poetry of Filial Sorrow
3
Heo Nanseolheon: A Contemporary Rival
Key Quotations
"The grape on the vine knows nothing of the ink that records it. The ink knows nothing of the grape. Yet they meet in the painting."
— Sin Saimdang, paraphrased from a tradition of remarks about her painting, mid-16th century
Variations of this thought run through the family and student tradition that preserved Saimdang's remarks about painting. The wording above is a paraphrase. The remark captures something specific about her aesthetic. The painting is not a copy of the grape, nor is it pure ink-play. It is the place where grape and ink meet. The painter's job is to facilitate this meeting through careful observation (of the grape) and disciplined skill (with the ink). The painter does not impose meaning; the painter creates the conditions for the meeting. The view is broadly Chinese-influenced and Confucian, with Daoist resonances about non-imposition. Saimdang's grape paintings have been admired across centuries because they actually do this: the grapes look like grapes, the ink looks like ink, and the painting is a third thing that combines them with quiet skill. For intermediate students, the line is a useful introduction to East Asian aesthetic theory at its most subtle. Painting is not representation alone, nor expression alone, but the meeting of attention and material in a specific made object.
"Read with care. Write with care. Paint with care. Live with care. Care is the same skill in different work."
— Sin Saimdang, paraphrased from her advice to her children on Confucian self-cultivation, mid-16th century
Variations of this advice are recorded in the family tradition preserved by her son Yi I and his followers. The wording above is a paraphrase. The principle connects all the activities of a cultivated Confucian life. Reading the classics, writing letters and poetry, painting, and living one's daily life are not separate domains. They share a common ground in the cultivated attention (kong, 工, careful work) that the practitioner brings to each. A person who reads carelessly will write carelessly; one who paints carelessly will live carelessly. The principle is broadly Confucian: the unity of self-cultivation across all activities. Saimdang's specific contribution was to apply it to painting and embroidery and other 'feminine' activities that male Confucian writers often dismissed as mere women's work. In her hands, painting a butterfly was a Confucian practice as serious as memorising the Analects. For intermediate students, this is a useful corrective to the assumption that Confucian self-cultivation was for male scholars and political life only. Saimdang made it for women too, in their own activities.
Using This Thinker in the Classroom
Ethical Thinking When teaching students about working within hierarchical systems
How to introduce
Discuss with students how Saimdang navigated Joseon Confucian society. She did not openly challenge its hierarchy or restrictions on women. She worked within them: chose a Confucian pen name invoking a model mother, fulfilled wifely and motherly duties, taught her own son who became a major Confucian philosopher. Within these accepted frames, she also painted, wrote, did calligraphy, and educated herself across the Confucian classics. Discuss with students: how should we evaluate strategies of working within hierarchical systems versus directly challenging them? Both approaches have costs and benefits. Direct challenge can produce broader change but often at high personal cost. Working within can produce real individual achievements but may reinforce the system's overall structure. Saimdang's approach is one careful example of working within. The exercise of thinking carefully about both strategies, rather than dismissing one for the other, is good practice in serious ethical thinking about hierarchical contexts.
Research Skills When teaching students about how reputations are constructed posthumously
How to introduce
Discuss with students how Saimdang's image was reframed after her death. The earliest contemporary references treated her as a major artist, scholar, and poet. After her death, her son Yi I memorialised her, and later Confucian writers gradually reframed her as a model 'wise mother' celebrated above all for nurturing her famous son. The 'wise mother' framing came to dominate Korean memory of her, sometimes obscuring her own artistic and scholarly identity. Discuss with students: how are people remembered after their deaths? Often selectively, in ways that serve the agendas of those doing the remembering. Saimdang's case is one of the cleaner historical examples. Recovering her from layers of posthumous reframing has been a major project of contemporary Korean scholarship. The exercise of recognising that historical reputations are constructed, not just transmitted, is essential for serious historical research. Sources matter; framings matter; what was said about someone fifty or two hundred years after their death may not represent who they were in life.
Further Reading

For deeper reading, Burglind Jungmann's article 'Changing Notions of Feminine Spaces in Choson-Dynasty Korea: The Forged Image of Sin Saimdang (1504-1551)' (2018) is essential for understanding the posthumous reframing of her image. The various essays in JaHyun Kim Haboush and Martina Deuchler's edited volumes on Joseon women provide context. Korean Women's Studies has published important work. The scholarly Korean writing on her, particularly recent work re-evaluating her as artist alongside her maternal role, is now extensive though much remains untranslated.

Key Ideas
1
The Posthumous Reframing
2
Joseon Women's Status: Before and After Saimdang's Time
3
The Banknote and Its Critics
Key Quotations
"I am Tairen by name and aspiration. The mother of King Wen of Zhou is my model. To be such a mother is the highest work of a woman in this world."
— Sin Saimdang, paraphrased from her own explanation of her pen name, recorded by her son Yi I
Variations of this explanation of her pen name are recorded by her son Yi I and his followers. The wording above is a paraphrase. The pen name 'Saimdang' invokes Tairen (Tai-im in Korean), the mother of King Wen of Zhou in classical Chinese tradition, who was honoured as one of the great Confucian model mothers. Saimdang chose the name as both identification and aspiration. The interpretation is delicate. Some readers have taken the name as evidence that Saimdang's deepest self-understanding was as a mother, supporting the later 'wise mother' framing. Others have argued that the name was a strategic choice within Joseon Confucian society: by claiming a recognised maternal model, Saimdang gained social space within which her artistic and scholarly work could be tolerated. The two readings are not exclusive. She probably did genuinely value being a mother. She was probably also strategically navigating a society that would have constrained her work without such framing. For advanced students, the line is a useful study in how women within hierarchical societies have used legitimate frames (motherhood, religious devotion, charity) to create space for activities the framework would otherwise have refused. Recognising the strategy is part of taking such women seriously.
"My grandfather taught me as he would have taught a grandson. So I learned what daughters were not taught. He was old, I was young, and the books did not know we were doing wrong."
— Sin Saimdang, paraphrased from family tradition about her childhood education, recorded after her death
Variations of this thought are recorded in family tradition about her childhood education at her maternal grandfather's home. The wording above is a paraphrase. The remark captures something both wry and significant about how women's exclusion from learning could be circumvented in specific cases. Joseon Neo-Confucian norms were tightening on women's education, but those norms were enforced socially rather than through any formal mechanism that prevented an old man from teaching his bright granddaughter what he wanted to teach her. The books did not know. The classical Chinese characters did not refuse to be read by a girl. The exclusion worked through social pressure on tutors and parents, not through anything intrinsic to the learning itself. Saimdang's grandfather chose to ignore the social pressure. Her father later chose her husband for the same willingness. The result was that she learned, in private and family circumstances, what the broader society had begun forbidding to women. For advanced students, the line is useful for understanding how systems of exclusion actually work. They are usually social and informal; specific individuals can choose not to enforce them; specific learners can be educated despite them. The pattern is not unique to Joseon. It applies in many cases of formal or informal educational exclusion.
Using This Thinker in the Classroom
Cultural Heritage and Identity When teaching students about memory politics and currency
How to introduce
Discuss with students the 2009 issuance of the 50,000-won note featuring Sin Saimdang. She was the first woman on a South Korean banknote. The Bank of Korea framed the choice as recognising her artistic achievements while emphasising her maternal role. Korean feminists criticised this framing as reinforcing sexist stereotypes about women's primary value being domestic. Discuss with students: who appears on currency, stamps, and monuments matters. These choices shape collective memory in specific ways. The arguments about Saimdang's banknote are continuous with arguments about Harriet Tubman on the US $20 bill, debates about which women should be on UK or Australian banknotes, controversies about Confederate monuments in the US South. The exercise of taking memory politics seriously, rather than treating these choices as neutral, is good practice for understanding how nations decide what to remember and how.
Emotional Intelligence When teaching students about filial grief in literature
How to introduce
Discuss with students Saimdang's poem Yu Daegwallyeong Mangchinjeong (Looking Back at My Parents' Home While Going Over Daegwallyeong Pass). It records her grief at having to leave her widowed mother behind in Gangneung when duty required her to follow her husband. The poem combines specific personal feeling with the wider social pattern that produced such feeling: most married Joseon women lived this experience in some form. Discuss with students: how does literature help us understand emotions that are both personal and social? Saimdang's grief was hers specifically. It was also a structural grief produced by the patrilocal marriage practices of her society. Literature like her poem makes visible how emotions are not just inside individuals but produced by social structures. The exercise of holding both dimensions, the personal and the social, is good practice for serious reading of literature about feeling.
Common Misconceptions
Common misconception

She is mainly important as the mother of Yi I (Yulgok).

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What to teach instead

She was a major artist, scholar, and poet in her own right before she was Yulgok's mother. Her paintings are designated National Treasures; her poetry is studied in Korean schools; her place in Korean art history would be significant even if she had had no famous children. The framing of her as primarily Yulgok's mother developed over centuries after her death, especially in later Joseon Confucian tradition, and was politically reinforced by the Park Chung-hee government in the twentieth century. Recovering her as artist-and-mother, rather than mother-only, is the project of contemporary Korean scholarship. Reading her primarily through Yulgok inverts the actual chronological relationship: she was an established artist for years before he was born, and educated him into the tradition she had already mastered.

Common misconception

Joseon women in general had access to learning like Saimdang did.

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What to teach instead

They did not. Saimdang's education was unusual and depended on specific family circumstances: no sons, supportive grandfather, willing father, sympathetic husband. Most Joseon girls received basic domestic training only. Most Joseon women had no opportunity to study Chinese classics, no opportunity to develop sustained artistic careers, and limited literacy even in Hangul. Reading Saimdang as representative of Joseon women misrepresents the broader picture. She was an exception. Her case shows what was possible in unusual circumstances, not what was generally available. Recognising this matters for understanding both her own achievement (it required circumstances most women did not have) and the actual condition of most Joseon women (which was much more restricted).

Common misconception

She was a feminist by her own self-understanding.

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What to teach instead

She was not, in any modern sense. She lived in the early sixteenth century, four hundred years before modern feminism. Her self-understanding was thoroughly Confucian: she chose a pen name invoking a Confucian model mother, fulfilled wifely and maternal duties as her tradition prescribed, and educated her son in the Confucian classics. She was not arguing for women's equality. She was being an exceptional Confucian woman within Confucian categories. Modern Korean feminists have engaged with her legacy in complicated ways: some claim her as an early model of female achievement; others critique her use as a domestic icon; few claim she was a feminist herself. Reading her through modern feminist categories misrepresents her actual self-understanding. The work of recovering her as artist-and-scholar can be done without anachronistically making her into a modern feminist.

Common misconception

Her artistic style was purely traditional Korean.

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What to teach instead

It was not purely traditional, nor was it purely Korean. Joseon visual art was deeply shaped by Chinese painting traditions, including the literati painting tradition that Saimdang's chochungdo extended. Her grape paintings drew on Chinese precedents. Her landscape style learned from earlier Chinese and Korean masters. Her chochungdo genre had Chinese antecedents she developed in distinctively Korean directions. Treating her work as either purely Korean innovation or as derivative Chinese influence both misrepresent the picture. The honest account is that she worked within an East Asian tradition that crossed the China-Korea border, while making distinctive contributions that became identifiably Korean. The China-Korea cultural relationship was complicated and continuous; reading Joseon art as either independent of China or as merely Chinese provincial work misses the real situation.

Intellectual Connections
Complements
King Sejong the Great
Sejong (reigned 1418-1450) and Saimdang (1504-1551) were both major Joseon figures within the Confucian framework Sejong had institutionalised. The Joseon culture in which Saimdang's painting and scholarship were honoured was significantly the culture Sejong had shaped: the alphabet enabling wider literacy, the merit-based appointment system, the cultural emphasis on scholarship. Saimdang lived a half-century after his death, but the conditions of her recognition as a Confucian model woman were partly his creation. Reading them together gives students two of the most celebrated figures in Korean history, one a king who shaped institutions and one a woman who lived within them with exceptional accomplishment.
Develops
Ban Zhao
Ban Zhao (c. 45-117 CE), the Han dynasty Chinese scholar, historian, and author of Lessons for Women, was a foundational figure of the East Asian tradition of women's Confucian scholarship. Ban Zhao argued that women too needed serious learning to fulfil their roles properly. Saimdang, working in Joseon Korea fourteen centuries later, was in some ways a continuation of this tradition. Both were exceptional women who received serious classical education through specific family circumstances. Both worked within Confucian frameworks rather than challenging them. Both produced work that has lasted across centuries despite the patriarchal restrictions of their societies. Both already in this library, the comparison gives students a sense of how Confucian women's scholarship has connected across centuries and across China and Korea.
Complements
Murasaki Shikibu
Murasaki Shikibu (c.973-c.1014) wrote The Tale of Genji in eleventh-century Heian Japan; Sin Saimdang painted and wrote in sixteenth-century Joseon Korea. Both were exceptional women whose access to classical learning depended on specific family circumstances (Murasaki's father teaching her, Saimdang's grandfather teaching her). Both produced work that became foundational to their respective East Asian cultures. Both lived in Confucian-influenced societies (more strongly so in Saimdang's Joseon than Murasaki's Heian Japan) where women's public scholarly work was generally restricted. Both are now celebrated as among the greatest pre-modern women in their respective national cultures. Reading them together gives students two of the most important pre-modern East Asian women writers and artists, working in different countries and centuries on related challenges.
Complements
Hokusai
Hokusai (1760-1849), the Japanese ukiyo-e master, and Saimdang are both major East Asian visual artists whose works remain foundational to their national visual traditions. The differences are real: Hokusai worked in popular woodblock prints, Saimdang in literati ink painting; Hokusai was a working male artist supported by commercial markets, Saimdang an aristocratic woman whose work was preserved through family and Confucian traditions. The similarities are also real: both observed nature with extraordinary care, both elevated genres (ukiyo-e for Hokusai, chochungdo for Saimdang) that had been treated as minor, both produced work that has lasted centuries. Reading them together gives students a sense of how East Asian visual traditions have produced major figures in different countries and forms. Both already in this library, the comparison is direct.
Complements
Hildegard of Bingen
Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), the German abbess, mystic, composer, and natural philosopher, and Sin Saimdang (1504-1551), the Korean artist, scholar, and poet, were both exceptional women in heavily patriarchal religious societies (medieval Catholic Europe and Neo-Confucian Joseon Korea). Both received unusual learning through specific institutional circumstances (monastic education for Hildegard, family education for Saimdang). Both produced work across multiple forms (theology, music, science, herbal medicine for Hildegard; painting, calligraphy, poetry, embroidery for Saimdang). Both have been celebrated and re-evaluated in their cultures over centuries. Both already in this library, the comparison gives students two strong cases of how exceptional women in restrictive religious societies could produce substantial bodies of work through specific institutional or family openings.
Anticipates
Han Kang
Han Kang, the contemporary South Korean Nobel laureate, writes in a Korean literary tradition that includes both male canonical figures and a smaller but significant tradition of women's writing going back through Joseon. Saimdang's poetry, alongside that of Heo Nanseolheon and a few others, formed part of the deep root of Korean women's literary expression that has continued in different forms across centuries. The connection is not direct stylistic influence; modern Korean women's writing has many sources. But Saimdang and her near-contemporaries established that Korean women could produce serious literary art, even within strict patriarchal Confucian society. That precedent has been part of how subsequent generations of Korean women writers, including eventually Han Kang, could claim space within Korean literature. Both already in this library, the comparison gives students a sense of the long history of Korean women's writing across nearly five hundred years.
Further Reading

For research-level engagement, Yi Sun-mi's writings on Saimdang and on Joseon women's painting are foundational in Korean. Mark Peterson's writings on Joseon women's status, including 'Women without Sons' (1983), give essential context for understanding how Saimdang's specific family circumstances enabled her access to learning. Edward W. Wagner's research on early Joseon genealogies and women's status is important. The Korea Journal and Seoul Journal of Korean Studies regularly publish relevant work. For Saimdang's chochungdo specifically, Park Eun-sun and other contemporary Korean art historians have produced detailed analytical work. Her surviving paintings are held at the National Museum of Korea, Ojukheon Museum, Harvard Art Museums, and several other major institutions.