The Beauty of Prayer — Buddhist Art of the Koryŏ and Chosŏn Periods
Kyushu National Museum · Dazaifu
The exhibition’s greatest strength is the concentration, in Japan, of Korean Buddhist works now dispersed among museums, temples and shrines. Its forty-eight catalogue entries range across paintings, sculpture, illuminated scriptures, bronzes, celadon and lacquer. Seen together, they reveal both the material breadth of Buddhist art on the peninsula and the importance of Japan as a major site of preservation for Korean cultural heritage.
The exhibition compares Koryŏ and Chosŏn without reducing them to a simple opposition between a Buddhist kingdom and a Confucian one. Koryŏ court patronage clearly supported Buddhism, while the Chosŏn state restricted its institutional power. Yet the production of images, scriptures and ritual objects continued. Prayer therefore provides a useful thread for tracing Buddhist continuity across political rupture.
Rather than telling a purely dynastic history, the exhibition places belief at the center. The uses of works, their devotional efficacy and the continuity of religious practices connect Koryŏ and Chosŏn more effectively than chronology alone.
Installed in two rooms of the Cultural Exchange Gallery, the show operates as a concentrated study display rather than a large retrospective. This scale encourages close comparison between media. Painting remains central, but it is repeatedly brought into dialogue with sculpture, liturgical objects and sacred texts.
At more than four meters high, this is one of the monuments of Koryŏ Buddhist painting. The museum emphasizes its collective production by court painters on a single enormous silk support. Transparent veils, jewelry and textile patterns combine material splendor with Avalokiteśvara’s compassionate presence.
This sculpture condenses another quality of Koryŏ art: a calm, approachable sacred presence created through relaxed posture and a gentle expression. Its small scale encourages close viewing, in marked contrast with monumental hanging paintings.
The object demonstrates how metalworking virtuosity served ritual. Sanskrit characters and silver floral scrolls animate the dark bronze surface as light changes. It also reminds us that Buddhist experience involved scent, gesture and spatial atmosphere as well as images.
The exhibition places Korean works within a concrete East Asian geography. Political history, collecting, ritual materiality and maritime circulation become inseparable. For Koryŏ and early Chosŏn, this approach is especially productive because it shows that the history of forms is also a history of uses and movements.
うるわしき祈りの美 successfully places famous masterpieces beside less spectacular ritual objects without reducing Korean Buddhist art to a history of style. Its most important contribution is the relationship it establishes between beauty, materiality and devotional use.