Geumyongdang Ilseop (1900-1975) was a towering figure in modern and contemporary Korean Buddhist art. A master of Buddhist statues, Buddhist paintings and dancheong, the traditional decorative painting on temple buildings, he traveled to temples across the country and trained more than 280 disciples over five generations.
A six-volume collection covering his life and art, "Visvakarma of Modern and Contemporary Korean Buddhist Art: Geumyong Ilseop," has been published. The project was overseen by the monk Gogyeong, director of the Songgwangsa Temple Museum, and compiled by Shin Eun-young, a curator at the museum, and Song Eun-seok, a professor at Dongguk University's WISE Campus, both specialists in the history of Buddhist art.
"Ilseop did not simply try to preserve the old. He made many creative attempts to further develop Buddhist art on the basis of tradition," Gogyeong said at a press conference on the 7th at the Korean Buddhist History and Culture Memorial Hall in Jongno District, Seoul. One work that best illustrates this is a Maitreya painting created in 1951 for Buyongsa Temple in Gimje. It places Maitreya Buddha at the center alongside Jesus, Muhammad and Confucius, bringing together four of the world's great sages in a single composition. "It was completed in the chaos of war just after the January 4 retreat, in a search for salvation. I have never seen such an attempt before," Gogyeong said.
Ilseop began painting under the monk Bongrin of the Jogyesan school and worked at temples nationwide — from Jeolla and Gyeongsang provinces to Hamgyong Province and Manchuria — creating Buddhist paintings and statues, applying dancheong and restoring cultural heritage. In 1938 he took charge of the dancheong and the main altar painting at Taegosa, now Jogyesa, a symbolic temple of Korean Buddhism. In 1972 he was designated a master of dancheong under the important intangible cultural heritage system. He also devoted himself to teaching, establishing a training institute for Buddhist statues and paintings at Buyongsa during Japanese colonial rule to cultivate professional temple painters. The roughly 280 disciples produced through the institute over five generations form an important lineage in contemporary Korean Buddhist art.
The collection had its origins in 2014, when the monk Jigwan of Buyongsa entrusted Ilseop's belongings to the Songgwangsa Temple Museum. Ilseop kept meticulous chronological records of his life and his working process. Drawing on those records, the authors spent about a decade visiting some 250 temples and lecture halls across the country, documenting 2,607 Buddhist statues, 383 Buddhist paintings and hundreds of painting sketches and dancheong works. "Each time he worked, Ilseop wrote in detail why he undertook the project, what form it took and whom he worked with," Song said. "I believe it holds great value as a documentary heritage that clearly expresses the characteristics of East Asian Buddhist art."
