Minhwa — literally "people's painting" or "folk painting" — is the most distinctly and exuberantly Korean of all the painting traditions represented in this gallery, a genre produced not by trained court painters working within established academic conventions but by anonymous artisan-painters serving the everyday spiritual, decorative, and auspicious needs of ordinary Korean people across the Joseon dynasty, and it is precisely this freedom from academic constraint and scholarly self-consciousness that gives Minhwa its irresistible vitality, its boldness of color, and the quality of joyful directness that distinguishes it immediately and unmistakably from the more restrained painting traditions of neighboring China and Japan. The subjects of Minhwa were drawn from the symbolic vocabulary of Korean folk belief and popular culture — tigers and magpies, carp and dragons, the ten longevity symbols, peonies and lotus flowers, the scholar's bookshelf laden with auspicious objects, the paradise of the immortals — rendered in pigments of vivid intensity, the colors chosen not for naturalistic accuracy but for their symbolic resonance and their sheer visual impact, reds and greens and blues and yellows placed in bold adjacency against one another in compositions of energetic, unselfconscious decorative power. What Minhwa lacks in the technical refinement of court painting it more than compensates for in warmth, humor, and an imaginative freedom that allowed its anonymous makers to reinvent traditional subjects with a creative latitude unavailable to painters working under the scrutiny of scholarly or imperial taste — the tigers of Minhwa, for instance, departing so completely from any naturalistic model that they become creatures of pure folk imagination, their wide eyes and comic expressions embodying a specifically Korean sensibility that has no equivalent elsewhere in East Asian art.