Cow’s cry at the dawn of 2021 (Year of the White Cow) was quite piercing. The outcry of the beloved and cherished spiritual animal felt strikingly different this year compared to the past five thousand years. The disparity in the outcry is not unrelated to the rampant pandemic raging all over the world, birthed by modern convenience and prosperity. What is the cow trying to communicate to mankind in the present moment? This article contemplates the history of East Asian twelve zodiacal animal deities and the meaning of the second animal, ‘cow’, in the twelve zodiacal animal deities through nine ceramic artists at Seoul’s “Space Shinseon”.
Twelve Zodiacal Animal Deities is an “animal sculpture consisting of 12 animals responding to 12 different directions, 12 months, 12 hours” 1. The deities represent an amalgamation of Asian farming culture and astronomy improved and developed individually by blending regional characteristics. The origin is in China’s Yellow River civilization with its natives’ interest in astronomy attempting to stop the annual flooding. The artwork depicts a rat, cow, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey, rooster, dog, and a pig, and was found in “an ancient tomb mural from the Han Dynasty’s Jian’an era (196~220)” 2. The zodiacal animals are commonly understood in the East and West to be about the concept of time and directions based on astronomy, but the twelve originate from different countries and regions. For example, Greece and Egypt have images of a bull, goat, lion, donkey, crab, snake, dog, cat, alligator, flamingo, monkey, and hawk, whereas ancient Babylonian region have cat, dog, snake, beetle, donkey, lion, goat, bull, hawk, monkey, flamingo, and an alligator.3
The first appearance of the personification of the twelve animals in sculpture, with the body of a human and head of an animal, occurred in the mid-Tang dynasty and is speculated to have been
