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An art name ( pseudonym or pen name), also known by its native names hào (in Mandarin Chinese), gō (in Japanese), (in Korean), and tên hiệu (in Vietnamese), is a professional name used by , poets and writers in the Sinosphere. The word and the concept originated in China, where it was used as nicknames for the educated, then became popular in other East Asian countries (especially in Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and the former Kingdom of Ryukyu).
In some cases, artists adopted different pseudonyms at different stages of their career, usually to mark significant changes in their life. Extreme practitioners of this tendency were Tang Yin of the Ming dynasty, who had more than ten hao, Hokusai of Japan, who in the period 1798 to 1806 alone used no fewer than six, and Kim Chŏnghŭi of the Joseon Dynasty who had up to 503.
The use of this name as a nom de plume or artistic name, however, appears to have begun only during the Six Dynasties period, with Tao Yuanming and Ge Hong among the first literati to have given themselves Hao.
Art names came into vogue during the Tang dynasty, during which time they could either be coined by the persons themselves, or given to them as a name by others. Most Hao can be placed within a few categories:
By the Song dynasty, the majority of literati called each other by their art names, which in turn often changed; this situation continued up to the 20th century.
One can often trace the relationship among artists with this, especially in later years, when it seems to have been fairly (although not uniformly) systematic (particularly in the Utagawa school) that the first character of the pupil's gō was the last of the master's gō.
Thus, an artist named Utagawa Toyoharu had a student named Utagawa Toyohiro, who, in turn, had as a pupil the famous landscape artist Hiroshige.
Another figure who studied under Toyoharu was the principal head of the Utagawa school, Utagawa Toyokuni. Toyokuni had pupils named Utagawa Kunisada and Kuniyoshi. Kuniyoshi, in turn, had as a student Yoshitoshi, whose pupils included Toshikata.
People can either create their own or it can be given to them by others. Typically people select their own based on the meaning of the name. When other people give a person a , it typically reflects their shared social context or relationship (parent to child, friend to friend, teacher to student, etc). Names can also be selected to avoid Naming taboo.
While most are made of two characters, they can be of any length. For example, the poet Kim Sang-ok had one that is ten characters long (). A person can also have any number of ; Kim exemplified this by having over twenty. According to the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture, he had the most art names of any modern Korean poet. An extreme example is that of the Joseon scholar Kim Jeong-hui who, by the estimate of famous calligrapher Oh Je-bong, had as many as 503. Some people change to reflect changes in their mood or situation.
Some are also exclusively written in the native Korean alphabet Hangul, without corresponding Chinese characters (Hanja). This too could be a symbolic choice. For example, the linguist Lee Byeong-gi chose a pure Hangul name () in part to reflect his sentiments as a Korean independence activist.
When a person writes an explanation for their , the explanation is called a () or (). A number of texts that catalogue and categorize various exist, which are called ().
can be subdivided into () or ().
are typical art names (pseudonyms for artists, writers, etc).
refers to the name of the building where an intellectual lives. In other words, intellectuals could be referred to by their house's name (it was once common practice for [[Korean intellectuals|seonbi]] to name their houses). For example, if someone's house was named () and that person went to the park one day, one could use their as such: "Ch'unghyodang went to the park." This was sometimes convenient to distinguish between people with similar names. While was typically reserved for the owner of the house, it could also be used to refer to other occupants. For example: "the eldest son of Ch'unghyodang".
In modern scholarship on the subject, a Roman numeral identifies an artist in the sequence of artists using a gō. Thus, Kunisada I is also known as Toyokuni III, since he was the third artist to use that gō.
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