The Journal of Korean Art and Archaeology

• This fourth volume of the International Journal of Korean Art and Archaeology gives prominence to papers concerning Goryeo Buddhist paintings, which were mentioned in the editorial note to the third volume as a part of Korean visual culture that were previously, despite their enormous importance, quite unrepresented in the national collections. A major exhibition, Masterpieces of Goryeo Buddhist Painting, with some contemporary examples of Buddhist paintings from Khara Khoto, China, and Japan, and loans from Japan, the United States, Russia, Germany and France, was held at the National Museum of Korea from October 12 to November 21, 2010. As well as a handsome catalogue, an international conference took place at the National Museum on October 28, 2010, and four of the papers reprinted here were first presented at that gathering. In terms of scope and the number of Goryeo paintings exhibited, the exhibition surpassed the previous exhibitions of Goryeo paintings, held in late 1993 (Exhibition of Koryo Buddhist Painting) and in 1995 (The Great Koryo Exhibition) both at the Hoam Art Gallery.

• The overwhelming majority of Goryeo Buddhist paintings have been preserved in temple and museum collections in Japan. Not only have these institutions taken exceptional care of these treasures, but Japanese scholars have been among the first to identify and investigate them. In Korea, where almost no Goryeo Buddhist paintings remained, the subject was virtually unknown until it began to attract scholarly attention in the 1970s, when the Museum Yamato Bunkakan staged the first such exhibition in 1978, curated by Yoshida Hiroshi. At the time Pak Youngsook studied Goryeo painting in Japan, and became the first Korean scholar to write about the subject, receiving her doctorate (soon to be reprinted in Seoul by Jimundang) in 1981 from the University of Heidelberg for her dissertation on the Cult of Kshitigarbha. Ever since there has been a steady stream of scholarly papers. International attention beyond East Asia was focused on the subject in 2003 when Kumja Paik Kim staged the exhibition Goryeo Dynasty: Korea's Age of Enlightenment, 918-1392, at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, with a number of important loans, including the enormous Water-Moon Avalokiteshvara from Kagami Jinja, discussed in some of the papers here.

• Chung Woothak’s paper on “The Identity of Goryeo Buddhist Painting” introduces the principal features of Goryeo Buddhist paintings, including their iconography and related sutra texts, stylistic details, distinctive patterns, the pigments and colour schemes employed, and the motivation of the royal and aristocratic patrons who commissioned them. Chung points out that although Buddhism had been established as the state religion from the foundation of the dynasty, all those Goryeo Buddhist paintings now extant date from the late Goryeo period, that is from the 14th century, apart from a single example from the late 13th century: information on earlier works is sadly lacking.

• Kim Junghee’s paper on “The Patrons of Goryeo Buddhist Painting,” expanding on earlier work by Kumagai Nobuo, is a detailed investigation focusing on the some twenty paintings (out of some 150 Goryeo Buddhist paintings known to be extant) that bear inscriptions, from which one may learn the identity of the patrons, who include members of the royal family, officials connected with government bureaux, military officers, monks and groups or societies of the faithful, including some very large groups. This fascinating aspect of the subject is also addressed by Park Eunkyung, whose paper is entitled “On the Periphery of Goryeo Buddhist Painting” since it does not deal with iconography and style, but is in fact concerned with the most intimate details of the weaving of the silks on which they were painted. It appears that Goryeo Buddhist paintings, in common with earlier silk paintings from Dunhuang, and indeed with Chinese silk paintings in general, were executed on a special type of weave, in which pairs of warp threads ran together and were spaced apart from the neighbouring pairs on either side. The author goes beyond this analysis to consider the relationship between different loom widths and the various groups and classes of society who were commissioning Buddhist paintings.

• Ide Seinosuke’s paper on “Buddhist Paintings from the Song and the Yuan Dynasties,” on the other hand, is not concerned with Goryeo Buddhist paintings as such, although he has published a number of papers on them, and has an encyclopaedic knowledge of them which he generously shared with this writer and Pak Youngsook on a research trip made in 2002 to study Goryeo Buddhist paintings in Japan. Instead his research concerns another major exhibition, held at the Nara National Museum in 2009: Sacred Ningbo, for which he was the principal advisor. Ningbo, as the principal port through which Japanese monks came to study in China, and from which they returned home, has a unique status in the history of Chinese Buddhist painting. In this exhibition, it was possible to display paintings from the 12th and 13th centuries, some of exquisite quality, tempting one to imagine what the paintings of the earlier Goryeo dynasty might have been like. Ide Seinosuke is particularly concerned with the distinctions between various types of images, and between those of Southern Song, on the one hand, and the Yuan dynasty, on the other. He points out that unlike a sculpture which is necessarily placed in our own space, a Buddhist painting, in addition to depicting the Buddha or other deity, also shows the surrounding space, which may be other-worldly, the space in which the deity normally resides, or in this world, as a result of either an apparition of the deity in our world, or in response to a prayer or summons from a believer, or a ceremony specifically designed to summon the deity. Such distinctions have the potential to be applied equally to Goryeo Buddhist painting, or indeed to religious painting world-wide.

• Moving from Goryeo to Joseon, the single most significant cultural innovation of the new dynasty was undoubtedly the invention of the hangeul system of writing, introduced in 1446 during the reign of King Sejong as hunmin jeongeum or “Correct phonetic script for the instruction of the people” and described by Jonathan Best (in Judith Smith, ed., Arts of Korea) as “a simple script perfectly designed for the writing of spoken Korean.” Lee Jae-jeong, for her paper “A Study of the Hangeul Metal Printing Types from the Collection of the National Museum of Korea” has investigated what must be a seldom-visited area of the storerooms of the National Museum of Korea, the collection of movable metal types. She has not only identified and dated a total of 753 different hangeul metal types belonging to fonts from the mid-fifteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but also, through comparison with surviving Joseon printed books, is able to prove that these were the actual types used to print a number of fifteenth-century and later texts. The achievement of Joseon in creating the hangeul writing system is already impressive enough, but it is rare indeed, or perhaps even without parallel, for a culture to be able to identify the actual types used to print some of its most famous books, so Lee Jae-jeong’s discovery is an important addition to the history of printing.

• Park Jinil’s paper, “A Study of the Attached-rim Pottery Culture of the Seoul and Gyeonggi Region” is a thorough piece of archaeological research, based on analysis of pottery and associated finds, which often include Korean-style daggers. The author reviewing past theories as well as results from the latest excavations and carbon-14 dating, is concerned with distinguishing the characteristics and interreactions of imported versus native culture and establishes that this type of mumun or undecorated pottery was introduced from the Liaoxi region (into which elements of Chinese culture from the state of Yan had already spread) no later than the fifth century BCE, prior to the development of the Korean dagger culture, and lasted through four phases to around the late first century BCE, merging with rather than supplanting the native culture.

• The National Museum of Korea is among a select group of famous institutions that house artefacts, including Buddhist paintings, from Central Asia, as the depository of a part of the materials from the Ōtani expeditions of the early twentieth century. In 1989 Kwon Young-pil published a catalogue of a part of the collection; in 2005 the National Museum opened a permanent gallery for the collection in the new building, and in the following year appointed as Associate Curator of the collection Kim Haewon, who had received her Ph.D. on Tang Buddhist painting from Dunhuang from the University of Pennsylvania. Her paper for this issue of the Journal, “A History of the Central Asian Collection at the National Museum of Korea,” details the history of this part of the Ōtani collection, from the beginning of the twentieth century to the opening of the new gallery.

• Finally in this issue, we include a paper by a western scholar, Beth McKillop, casting new light on a Joseon royal manuscript which, through an unfortunate set of circumstances a century and a half ago, is now in the collection of the British Library, in whose Asian section she was formerly a curator. The manuscript itself is impressively bound, written and illustrated with the most careful exacting skill, and in excellent condition. It sets out in every detail, from flowers and implements to the positions of all the participants, the ceremonies carried out in 1809 to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the consummation of the marriage of the ill-fated Prince Sado with Lady Hyegyeong. The leading scholar on court documentary paintings of the Joseon dynasty is Park Jeong-hye from the Academy of Korean Studies, whose monograph Joseon sidae gungjeong girokhwa yeongu (Study on Joseon Court Documentary Paintings) was published in Seoul in 2000, illustrates two bifolios (Plates 81-1, 81-2), and comments on the western-influenced diagonal arrangement, distinct from earlier examples. While it is clearly not possible in the Journal to illustrate all 96 folios, or any of the individual illustrations of flowers, instruments and costumes, this paper is a welcome addition to the article by Park Jeong-hye in Volume 02 of this Journal, “Court Paintings on the Crown Princes of the Joseon Dynasty.” Moreover, the inclusion of a piece of research by a western scholar is a welcome enhancement of the Journal, one which it is hoped will become a regular feature of future issues.

• It has been a pleasure to engage with the authors of the several papers in the course of editing this issue, and I trust that every reader will find new and thought-provoking matter for his or her interests and to advance scholarship in the field of Korean art and archaeology.