Art name

Art name
Chinese name
Traditional Chinese	號
Simplified Chinese	号
Literal meaning	“mark”
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin hào Wade–Giles hao
Vietnamese name
Vietnamese alphabet	tên hiệu
Hán-Nôm	𠸛號
Korean name
Hangul	호
Hanja	號
Transcriptions Revised Romanization ho McCune–Reischauer ho
Japanese name
Kana	ごう (modern usage) がう (historical usage)
Kyūjitai	號
Shinjitai	号
Transcriptions Romanization gō

An art name (pseudonym or pen name), also known by its native names hào (in Mandarin Chinese), gō (in Japanese), ho (in Korean), and tên hiệu (in Vietnamese), is a professional name used by East Asian artists, poets and writers. 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 Jeong-hui of the Joseon Dynasty who had up to 503.^[1]