This talk examines the depiction of celestial youth musicians in late Chosŏn Buddhist temple interiors. From the eighteenth century onward, youthful male performers increasingly displaced the female celestials conventionally associated with heavenly music. Their instruments and costumes drew not only on military culture but also on performance idioms that had circulated beyond their institutional origins through court ceremonies, official processions, private banquets, village festivals, and market entertainment. Drawing on a relational database of eighty-six temple halls and selected regional case studies, this talk traces how painter-monks transformed this socially familiar language of performance into an architectural image of the Buddha land. Instead of representing the actual sound of Buddhist liturgy, these painted ensembles converted the timbres, visual codes, and bodily energies of contemporary spectacle into imagined offerings of music and performance. In this way, the temple ceiling became a site where Buddhist cosmology was recalibrated through the sensory and social forms of late Chosŏn performance culture.
Maya Stiller works on the premise that religion has a budget, a labor force, and a donor list, and she is interested in what those records reveal that doctrine does not. Her research asks who paid for Korea’s Buddhist temples, who carved and painted them, what people did once they arrived, and why the categories we inherit (Buddhist, Daoist, shamanic, Confucian) dissolve on close contact with the evidence. She works mainly on Korea between roughly 1200 and 1900, and keeps finding that the interesting things happened at the edges rather than the centers.
This lecture is generously supported by the UVA East Asia Center.
Image: Celestial musicians, 1879, late Chosŏn, Taeungjŏn, Yanghwasa, North P’yŏngan Province, North Korea.