Musindo, the Shrine Painting

A Korean shamanic shrine room is hung with painted scrolls, and reading the wall tells you who works there. The gods that appear are not drawn from a fixed and published pantheon but from the particular relationships a practitioner has: a mountain spirit associated with a specific place, the seven stars, martial generals, a historical king treated as a spirit, the founding spirits of that line of practice, and sometimes a Buddhist figure sitting comfortably alongside the rest. Two shrines a few streets apart can therefore hold quite different sets of paintings, and a practitioner may add one when a new relationship is established.

While it hangs, the painting is treated as where the god is. Offerings are set before it, it is addressed directly, and it is cared for. When the relationship ends, whether because the practitioner stops working or because the god is no longer served, the painting is retired rather than simply taken down and stored. The paintings themselves are frontal and emphatic, with strong outlines, flat mineral colour and figures that fill the sheet, and the conventions of dress and attribute make the subject identifiable at a glance across a dim room. Most surviving examples are of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, so the corpus documents a recent stretch of a much older practice.

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.