Early Buddhist Art from Korea and Japan

[thomas]

Early Buddhist Art from Korea and Japan at Japan Society Gallery
Wednesday, April 9, 2003 — Sunday, June 22, 2003

"Transmitting the Forms of Divinity: Early Buddhist Art from Korea and Japan" is the first major exhibition to examine Korea’s influence in the development of Buddhist culture in Japan during the 6th to 9th centuries, when Buddhism first spread through Northeast Asia. The exhibition, on view in its sole venue at Japan Society Gallery from April 9 – June 22, 2003, presents masterpieces of the earliest Buddhist art ever created in Korea and Japan. Featuring an unprecedented selection of Buddhist sculpture in gilt bronze, wood, stone and iron; architectural relics, such as decorative or commemorative ceramic tiles for temples; precious reliquaries, ritual implements and sûtra scrolls, the exhibition presents the unique stylistic and iconographic expressions of early Buddhist art in Korea; shows how this Korean style was the direct precedent for the origins of Buddhist art in Japan; and follows the independent developments of Korean and Japanese Buddhist art in the 9th century. The exhibition and its accompanying book are inspired by recent research on the close political and cultural ties between the ancient kingdoms of the Korean peninsula and Japan, and illuminate a long-neglected dynamic in the development of Buddhist culture in Northeast Asia. This new scholarship is particularly remarkable given the turbulent relations of these two nations over the past century.

=> http://news.amn.org/press.jsp?id=1303