From Sacred Icons to Cultural Heritage: The Government-General Museum and the Reconfiguration of Korean Buddhist Visual Culture, 1915–1945

This article examines how the Government-General Museum of Korea (1915–1945) reconfigured Korean Buddhist visual culture, transforming objects embedded in living devotional practice into specimens of cultural heritage. Moving beyond existing scholarship on the colonial reorganization of Korean Buddhist institutions, it argues that the museum did not simply house Buddhist materials; rather, it produced a new mode of existence for them, one defined by a constitutive ambivalence in which the very apparatus that detached these objects from their devotional lives also “preserved” them as art-historical heritage. The argument develops through three case studies, each addressing a distinct register of the museum’s reconfigurative work: the acquisition and classification of the ten-story stone pagoda of Gyeongcheon temple, traced from monastic monument to cataloged specimen; the spatial reassembly of a Buddhist pantheon in the inaugural exhibition of 1915, staged within the emptied precincts of Gyeongbok Palace; and the photographic seriation of Unified Silla Buddhist material in the Album of Korean Antiquities. Drawing on theories of the exhibitionary apparatus, museum ritual, and mechanical reproduction, the article demonstrates that the religious identity of the colonial-modern “Buddhist object” was not simply erased but rearchived as an esthetic and art-historical attribute. It concludes that this reconfiguration was not discarded but strategically reappropriated by the postcolonial Korean state, which re-coded the colonial categories for national ends even as it continued to administer Buddhist objects through them.