A polychrome painted wood tiger plaque19th/20th century
Comprised of the raised-relief elements of a tiger head with stiff metal whiskers biting a sword in its mouth and an octagonal trigram emblem, all affixed by modern screws to a thin red-painted wood board of rectangular shape.
16 1/4in (41.2cm) tall注脚The present lot could possibly have decorated the outside of, or been related to, a sanshin gak (Mountain Spirit hall), a small building often found in Korean Buddhist temple complexes. Painted depictions of the Mountain Sprit, originally a shamanist deity, are identified by the tiger accompanying him: see Robert Moes, Auspicious Spirits: Korean Folk Paintings and Related Objects (Washington DC, International Exhibitions Foundation, 1983), for several earlier prototypes. These include a seventeenth-century painted depiction of a sanshin with his tiger (cat. no.23, p.72) and an eighteenth or nineteenth-century wooden tiger (cat. no.74, p.151); for a similar wooden haetae, a tiger-like mythical feline, see cat. no.69, p.149.