God Pictures in Korean Contexts : The Ownership and Meaning of Shaman Paintings

Shamans walking on knives, fairies riding on clouds, kings with dragon mounts: They are gods and they are paper images. Some are repulsed and unsettled by shaman paintings, some cannot stop collecting them, and some use them as sites of veneration. Laurel Kendall, Jongsung Yang, and Yul Soo Yoon explore what it is that makes a Korean shaman painting magical or sacred. How does a picture carry the trace of a god and can it ever be “just a painting” again? How have shaman paintings been revalued as art? Do artfulness and magic ever intersect? Does it matter, as a matter of market value, that the painting was once a sacred thing? Navigating the journey shaman paintings make from painters’ studios to shaman shrines to private collections and museums, the three authors deftly traverse the borderland between scholarly interests in the material dimension of religious practice and the 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 a 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 told with an awareness of both recent South Korean history and 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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“What is a Korean shaman painting?” Or perhaps, “When is a Korean shaman painting?” What makes a shaman painting more than “just a painting”? Painted Gods describes the active lives that Korean shaman paintings lead in shamans’ shrines, art collections, and museums, what the paintings signify in these different contexts of social practice, and how they came to be there. It describes how paintings interact with shamans to transmit the will of the gods and how the production of shaman paintings has changed over a century, considering how shamans and South Korean collectors regard changes wrought by the age of mechanical reproduction. It considers when and why collectors began to value old shaman paintings as art and how protocols for shaman paintings as magical things sometimes abetted their transmission to the art market. Drawing on the work of Alfred Gell and Bruno Latour, it takes on the slippery question, what distinctive properties make the painting a magical thing on the one hand and a work of art on the other and how might these properties intersect? Painted Gods combines the work of material cultural studies and the study of material religion, bringing a new perspective to anthropological interest in the social life of things 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". Contents Preface and Acknowledgments 1. Introduction: The Lives of Korean Shaman Paintings 2. What Are Shaman Paintings? 3. Korean Shaman Paintings Collected 4. Painted Gods at Home 5. Gods Painted, Gods Bought and Sold Coda: Painted Gods in Museums Notes Bibliography Index About the Authors Introduction: The Lives Of Korean Shaman Paintings -- What Are Shaman Paintings? -- Korean Shaman Paintings Collected -- Painted Gods At Home -- Gods Painted, Gods Bought And Sold. Laurel Kendall, Jongsung Yang, Yul Soo Yoon. Includes Bibliographical References (pages 139-147) And Index.