Assembling the Sacred

Assembling the Sacred: Architecture, Sound, and DEvotion in Late Chosŏn Korean Buddhist Temples

Date: 10 December 2026 (Thu)
Time: 6:30pm-7:30pm
Venue: Faculty Lounge, Room 4.30, 4/f, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU
All are welcome, free seating

Abstract: Scholarship on Korean Buddhist art has largely treated altar paintings, sculptures, and architecture as discrete objects of study. Drawing on Dr. Stiller’s new book, Sensing the Buddha Land, this talk presents a new methodological framework for examining how late Chosŏn (ca. 1600–1900) artisan-monks assembled timber-frame architecture and mural programs into spatial environments that rendered Buddhist doctrine materially perceptible. Inscribed ceilings articulated complex doctrinal classifications and protective formulas, while images of celestial musicians transformed local performance cultures into imagined celestial sound. Artisans also organized devotional practice across intimate and expansive spatial scales by including niches dedicated to Kwanŭm (Avalokiteśvara) and serial buddha arrays. Grounded in a relational database that includes more than two hundred temple halls and approximately 5,300 murals, this study intervenes in a field long dominated by isolated case studies, revealing regional configurations, workshop practices, and doctrinal priorities that object-centered approaches have so far obscured. In doing so, this talk advances a spatial and multisensory model for the comparative study of sacred interiors across East Asia.

Speaker: Maya Stiller is an Associate Professor of Korean Art History & Visual Culture at the University of Kansas. She earned a doctorate in East Asian Art History from Freie Universität Berlin and a Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies from UCLA. Through both conventional art historical methodologies and innovative digital approaches, she examines the lived devotional practices and patronage networks that characterize premodern Korean Buddhism. Her research particularly examines how diverse social actors including carpenter-monks and female rulers shaped the iconography, style, and material production of non-modern Buddhist art. Dr. Stiller recently completed her second book, Sensing the Buddha Land: Architecture, Sound, and Devotion in Late Chosŏn Korea (University of Washington Press, 2027), which reconceptualizes Buddhist temple space as a richly sensory environment.