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Seoul Colloquium in Korean Studies
(Organized by the Seoul Center of the ÉFEO and RAS Korea)
The July 2024 session of the “Seoul Colloquium in Korean Studies” organized jointly by the Seoul Center of the EFEO and RAS Korea will be held as an in-person event on Thursday July 25th in the Grand Conference Room (Room number 310), of the Asiatic Research Institute, Korea University, beginning at 5:00 pm.
All who wish to participate must register in advance by sending an email to efeoseoul@hotmail.com
DATE: Thursday. July 25, 2024. 5:00PM
VENUE: Grand Conference Room (#310), of the Asiatic Research Institute, Korea University
Take Exit 1 from Korea University subway station, turn right onto the footpath leading up onto the campus. Walk straight up the road past LG Posco Hall, the Business School and Main Library (all on the right hand side). The Asiatic Research Institute is the building next after the Library (http://oia.korea.ac.kr/listener.do?layout=itd_4_1 )
After 5 pm the front door of the Institute may be locked. If the door is locked, phone to the EFEO Seoul Center (02-921-4526) so that we can let you into the building.
[ Image: Munsŏng (文性) et Pyŏngmun (炳文), Kamrot’aeng (甘露幀), 1939, Hŭngch’ŏnsa (興天寺), ink and colors on silk ]
SUMMARY:
Since their inception more than two millennia ago, Buddhism and Buddhist art have undergone cross-cultural pollination across inter-Asian and intra-Asian borders. While these international connections in Buddhist art have been productive in generating a transnational methodology in art history, little attention has been given to the modern transformation of Buddhist art. This presentation explores the intersection between Buddhist art (Buddhist world views, pluralism, cross-cultural histories, iconography, compositional logic, genres, and popular distribution platforms) and the epistemology of modern art and modernity (the division between the sacred and the secular, the avant-garde, categorization and canonization, curation and art education, and the expanded audience in new institutions alongside developments in technology and media) that emerged and crystallized amid the twentieth-century histories of nation-building, imperialist expansions, wars, and postcolonial independence. Secondly, expanding the inherently transcultural history of Buddhist art into the twentieth century allows for Korean modern art history to be discussed not just in the dyad of the West vs. Korea (or Japan vs. Korea), but as an entry point to investigate Buddhist heritage as part of the rise of Pan-Asianism and a series of wars, including the Cold War. As both a religious belief and an aesthetic system, the Buddhist legacy continued to reverberate across multiple regime changes and devastating wars. Therefore, this paper challenges the separation between pre-modern and modern, or the Chosŏn Dynasty and the modern/post-modern periods thereafter. The case studies include the Buddhist painting genre Kamrot’aeng (Sweet Dew Painting), the rituals of Yŏngsanjae and Ch’ŏndojae, and the vernacular lecture performance Ttangsŏlbŏp. Together, they pose crucial questions about the heterotemporality of indigenous modernity and alternative imaginations for contemporaneity, currently unaccounted for in the methods of global art history. Part of the research is supported by the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS) Visiting Scholar Fellowship in 2024.
BIO:
Sohl LEE is an Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art at Stony Brook University (SUNY). Her first book Reimagining Democracy: The Minjung Art Movement and Politics of Decolonization in South Korea, forthcoming from Duke University Press, traces the multifaceted process by which a particular decolonial aesthetics of politics emerged during South Korea’s democratization. Her current projects expand the work of historicizing the genealogy of decolonial thinking in modern visual cultures, investigating the contact zone between colonial modern epistemology and indigenous knowledge systems, between secularism and religious belief systems, between human and non-human inter-specific relations. This talk “Vernacular Modernism and Buddhist Art” is part of this expansive research interest. Her publications have appeared in Art Journal, Art History, Yishu, Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Journal of Korean Studies, and InVisible Culture.
Élisabeth Chabanol, Head of the Seoul Center, French School of Asian Studies/École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO)
Brother Anthony, President Emeritus, Royal Asiatic Society Korea
