Monk Artisans of the Chosŏn Dynasty: Buddhist Sculptures and Paintings
National Museum of Korea · Seoul
This exhibition shifts the focus in a productive way. Rather than treating Chosŏn Buddhist statues and paintings as anonymous objects, it restores the people who designed, carved, painted, gilded and consecrated them. The museum brought together 145 groups or objects from twenty-seven institutions, including fifty-four works lent by fifteen monasteries. The exhibited works involve 366 identified monk artisans. This exceptional corpus makes it possible to understand Buddhist art as the result of collective labor organized through workshops and lineages of technical transmission.
Its historical importance is equally strong. The exhibition substantially complicates the familiar narrative of Buddhism simply declining under the Chosŏn dynasty. After the Japanese invasions of 1592–1598, Buddhist sculpture and painting instead entered a period of intense production. The growing numbers of chogaksŭng (조각승, monk sculptors) and hwasŭng (화승, monk painters) reveal a particularly dynamic Buddhist visual culture developing within monasteries.
The exhibition presents the monk artisan as a major key to understanding Chosŏn Buddhist art. His identity is double: he is both a religious practitioner and a highly specialized professional. The making of a cult image therefore becomes inseparable from monastic practice, collective organization of labor and the transmission of expertise.
The exhibition is organized in four parts. It begins by defining the monk artisan, then effectively opens the sculpture and painting workshops. The third section gathers major works as the material culmination of these practices, before a conclusion devoted to the memory of these artisans and their contemporary reinterpretation. This avoids a simple chronological sequence: the visitor moves from social identity to the gestures of making and finally to the cult images themselves.
This work is one of the exhibition’s high points. Tanŭng transforms into three-dimensional relief a composition usually associated with altar painting: Amitābha sits at the center of a densely organized assembly. The object therefore blurs the boundary between Buddhist sculpture and painting. For the 2021 exhibition, it left its monastery for the first time since its creation 337 years earlier.
This large painting of Śākyamuni preaching demonstrates a monastic workshop’s ability to organize a monumental and extremely crowded composition without losing visual hierarchy. Ŭigyŏm, a major figure in eighteenth-century Buddhist painting, appears less as an isolated artist than as the leader of a collective of specialized painters.
The density of this painting makes the cosmological ambition of Hwaŏm art visible: several assemblies from the sūtra are distributed across a single surface saturated with figures, architecture and celestial spaces. The work shows how the virtuosity of monk painters served a religious and spatial problem: giving intelligible form to a potentially limitless doctrinal universe.
The main methodological lesson is not to separate iconography from manufacture. A Buddhist statue or painting can be studied simultaneously as image, material object, workshop product, result of a monastic network and ritual support. The exhibition therefore offers an excellent model for a social and material history of Korean Buddhist art.
The strength of 조선의 승려 장인 lies in making the producers of religious images visible. The masterpieces assembled are important, but the decisive contribution lies elsewhere: in reconstructing the workshops, collaborations, gestures and networks that made those works possible. The exhibition thus turns the study of Chosŏn Buddhist art into a history of practices as much as a history of forms.