MOTHER AND CUB
There's no force on the planet as powerful as the bond between a mother and her baby. It's primal, it's instinctive, it's fierce and no other love is as nurturing or awe-inspiring. It doesn't matter if we're talking about people or tigers; that same dichotomy of gentle love yet tooth-and-nail protectiveness joins all mothers together in a common bond.
The tiger theme also figures prominently in Corean lore. It could be your most powerful friend or your deadliest enemy. They can be evil akin to the Big Bad Wolf in the Three Little Piggies story or Little Red Riding Hood. They can be mischievous and often comical. They could be a bearer of good fortune, or meeting one could mean your doom. Sometimes scheming, and sometimes quite foolish. Some have become quite noble. The only constant in their character is the feline prerogative of unpredictability.
In the Legend of Tangun (which I've written about before), the tiger's impatience gets the better of him and he loses out on becoming human. This shame led to a great enmity of tigers toward humans for years. Eventually though, the son of that selfish jealous tiger (The Tiger of Shinshi, same link) redeems himself and in exchange for occasionally experiencing humanity (the first Corean were-tiger?), becomes the strength and guardian of the Golden Thread that binds all Corean people as one for all time.
Despite, or because of, their powerful yet unpredictable nature, the tiger earned the highest respect and even adoration in Corean lore. Even though there are no longer tigers in Corea (except possibly in the northern most borders), they are still remembered, as evident in the choice of mascot for the 1988 Olympics in Seoul. Chosen in 1984, the mascot became Hodori, a friendly Corean tiger cub wearing a traditional sangmo hat and a streamer that formed an English "S" to represent the host city, "Seoul."
For these reasons, I chose to represent the tiger and Hodori in my drawing above along with Amy and Sun Su.
Amy thinks this is my "best drawing ever," although it's not the first time I coupled her with the tiger theme. She really liked the modern hairstyle but says it would be too much trouble to keep up. The pattern on her shirt is from Corean ink paintings of bamboo trees. Sun Su is wearing his tiger stripe pajamas. Sun Su's hair is fun to draw and naturally wavey, even more than his appa's (me, daddy).
Many of my drawings in the past have featured my boy in them, in "Where's Sun Su" fashion. Lately though, it seems this has changed to "Where's Sun Su's handiwork?" As in, where's the part of the drawing that Sun Su "added to." In this drawing, Sun Su actually ripped a hole in the paper while I was still pencilling it. You can see the tear in the Hodori flag next to Sun Su's eyebrow line. I could have erased it in the scanned version but I thought I'd keep it. We love our tiger cubs, but damn, they can be trouble sometimes too.
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