God Pictures in Korean Contexts: The Ownership and Meaning of Shaman Paintings

Abstract

“What is a Korean shaman painting?” Or perhaps, “When is a Korean shaman painting?” What makes a shaman painting more than “just a painting”? Painted Gods describes the active lives that Korean shaman paintings lead in shamans’ shrines, art collections, and museums, what the paintings signify in these different contexts of social practice, and how they came to be there. It describes how paintings interact with shamans to transmit the will of the gods and how the production of shaman paintings has changed over a century, considering how shamans and South Korean collectors regard changes wrought by the age of mechanical reproduction. It considers when and why collectors began to value old shaman paintings as art and how protocols for shaman paintings as magical things sometimes abetted their transmission to the art market. Drawing on the work of Alfred Gell and Bruno Latour, it takes on the slippery question, what distinctive properties make the painting a magical thing on the one hand and a work of art on the other and how might these properties intersect? Painted Gods combines the work of material cultural studies and the study of material religion, bringing a new perspective to anthropological interest in the social life of things.