Overview

Shamans depicted walking on knives, fairies shown riding on clouds, kings astride dragon mounts: some find such pictures unsettling, some charming. Pursued by collectors, venerated as the seats of gods, Korean shaman paintings are all of these things. Laurel Kendall, Jongsung Yang, and Yul Soo Yoon explore what it is that makes these works magical or sacred—more than """"""""just paintings."""""""" What does it mean for a picture to carry the trace of a god? Once animated and revered, can it ever be a mere painting again? How have shaman paintings been revalued as art? Do artfulness and magic ever intersect? Is the market value of a painting influenced by whether or not it was once a sacred object? Navigating the journey shaman paintings make from painters' studios to shaman shrines to private collections and museums, the three authors deftly navigate the borderland between scholarly interests in the production and consumption of material religion and the consumption and circulation of art. Illustrated with sixty images in color and black and white, the book offers a new vantage point on """"""""the social life of things."""""""" This is not the story of a collecting West and a disposing rest: the primary collectors and commentators on Korean shaman paintings are South Koreans re-imagining their own past in light of their own modernist sensibility. It is a tale that must be told together with the recent history of South Korea and an awareness of the problematic question of how the paintings are understood by different South Korean actors—most particularly the shamans and collectors who share a common language and sometimes meet face-to-face.

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9780824847630

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Reviews

This book will be of great interest to specialists of Korean art and to those studying museum conservation of folk art and questions of meaning in painting.-- CHOICE

This is an important book and a must-read for the student of Korean religions.-- Religious Studies Review This book will be of great interest to specialists of Korean art and to those studying museum conservation of folk art and questions of meaning in painting.-- Choice This relatively small, illustrated, and well-considered text is described as both a study of material religion that takes seriously the use of paintings inside Korean shaman practice and a study of the circulation of shaman paintings from sacred to secular space, exploring the motivations and activities of dealers and collectors, a subject of interest in museum and material culture studies.-- Kyoto Journal

Author Information

Laurel Kendall is chair of the anthropology division and curator of the Asian ethnographic collections at the American Museum of Natural History. Jongsung Yang is director of the Museum of Shamanism in Seoul and emeritus senior curator of the National Folk Museum of Korea. Yul Soo Yoon is founder and director of the Gahoe Museum in Seoul, Korea.

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