The Lives of Painted Gods in the Korean Shaman World

Laurel Kendall
Name in Latin Alphabet:	Laurel Kendall
Nationality:	USA
Affiliation:	American Museum of Natural History

강연 소개

In Korean shaman practice, adherents encounter otherwise invisible gods in two vivid material forms: in the dancing, miming, bantering bodies of shamans as they manifest the gods during elaborate rituals called kut and in the bold and brightly-colored paintings that hang on the walls of shaman shrines. In this presentation anthropologist Laurel Kendall describes how the paintings work in shamanic practice and how they have found new after-lives in art galleries and museums. The Korean shaman’s body, the painted image, and the invisible gods abide in a triangulated and symbiotic relationship where the corporeal shaman and the material images on the wall of her shrine work in tandem as media to convey the presence and will of the gods. Some paintings are produced by traditionalist painters who observe a variety of workshop taboos and are in some sense inspired by the gods they portray but most paintings are now mass produced in workshops. Do these distinctions matter? Perhaps they matter most to the dealers and collectors who have come to view shaman paintings as a distinctive Korean artistic expression, overcoming earlier views of these same images as crude, garish, spooky and possibly even dangerous.

This lecture is based on a project of joint research conducted by Laurel Kendall with Jongsung Yang, a folklorist and Director of the Museum of Shamanism and Yul Soo Yoon, an art historian and Director of the Gahoe Museum. Our joint efforts appear as God Images in Korean Contexts: The Ownership and Meaning of Korean Shaman Paintings (forthcoming, September 2015, University of Hawai`i Press).

강연 영상

The Lives of Painted Gods in the Korean Shaman World