Korean Buddhist Sculpture - Background

Background

Korean Buddhist sculpture are relatively rare. Many were lost or destroyed in various invasions, internecine fighting, temple fires, or were smuggled out to Japan during the colonial period. The relative scarcity of images makes it especially difficult for scholars to completely understand the development of the art in Korea. Images available for study are generally those that have been excavated, the lucky survivors of peninsular tumult, or those images preserved in Japan. Experts may, therefore, have differing opinions on the exact age or place of manufacture for any specific image based on available information.

Each individual Buddhist sculpture has various characteristics and attributes which art historians use as clues to determine when and where it was made. Sometimes a statue will have an inscription or contain a document which attests to when, where, and who made it. Reliable archaeological records which state where a statue was excavated are also valuable clues for the historian. However, when neither of these sources of information are available, scholars can still glean important information on an individual statue by its style, the particular iconography employed by the artist, physical characteristics such as the material used to make the statue, the percentage of metals used in an alloy, casting and carving techniques, and various other contextual clues.

Images in Korea are made from a variety of material: wood, lacquer, metal, clay, and stone. Those that survive today are typically small bronze votive images used for private worship and sculpture carved in granite, the most abundant sculpting material available in Korea. Monumental images made for state-sponsored monasteries and devotional objects the royal and aristocratic families, for the most part, have unfortunately not survived. Although wood and lacquer images were known to have been made in Korea based on historical records and can be assumed based on surviving images in China and Japan, the fragility of these materials mean very few have survived in Korea.