Documentary paintings attempt to accurately depict the specific events that they seek to record or otherwise commemorate. Differing from paintings produced purely for appreciation, decoration, or religious purposes, they can be viewed as a form of genre paintings since they portray real figures and their lives at the time of their production. They also demonstrate aspects of history paintings in that their themes are incidents or events that actually occurred in the past. In short, paintings created for documentation or commemoration purposes during the centuries before photography can be defined as documentary paintings.

The Artistic Heritage Division of the National Research Institute of Cultural Heritage (NRICH) is conducting a project for establishing a database of state-designated documentary paintings that allows easier and more convenient searching for state-designated documentary paintings. The scope of what can be considered documentary paintings is expanded here to introduce a wider range of cultural heritage items, and forty-three paintings (grouped as forty-one items) with a documentary nature were selected from among paintings designated as national treasures or treasures. These documentary paintings are held by private institutions or in private collections and thus are not easily viewed by the general public. They were photographed to create 100-million-pixel-resolution images. Basic information and explanations on the paintings, pertinent prefaces, and postscripts were compiled to complement the photos, facilitating access to high-quality academic data. Uigwe (royal protocol) paintings, a notable example of documentary court paintings, are already available through the national heritage portal on the homepage of the Korea Heritage Service.

It is hoped that this project will elevate the general interest in documentary paintings, an important type of traditional Korean paintings, and contribute to the researching and sharing of Korean cultural heritage.