How the Paintings Reached the Museums

There are large collections of Korean shaman paintings in museums in Korea, Japan, Europe and North America, and almost none of them left a shrine under ordinary circumstances. Colonial period collectors and scholars gathered them as ethnographic specimens. The anti-superstition campaigns of the twentieth century emptied shrines and the contents dispersed. Later, once Korean folk art acquired a market, dealers bought paintings from practitioners or their families, and prices rose as the genre was recognised as art.

That history leaves an unresolved question in every display case. A musindo was not made to be looked at. It was made to be the seat of a god in a room where rites are performed, and the difference between a painting and a seat is exactly what the tradition asserts. Museums generally present the works as folk painting, with attention to pigment, composition and iconography, which is real scholarship and also a reframing. Practitioners have their own view of paintings that came out of shrines, and it is not uniformly the curators'. Nothing here is settled, and the honest description of the object includes the fact that its present location is usually the result of a practice being suppressed rather than of a sale between willing parties.