God pictures in Korean contexts : the ownership and meaning of shaman paintings
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
God pictures in Korean contexts : the ownership and meaning of shaman paintings
University of Hawaiʻi Press, c2015
- : pbk
Available at 3 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 139-147) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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.
by "Nielsen BookData"