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 artists, 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.