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<TITLE>Re: [KS] Korean Tea Ceremony and other wonders</TITLE>
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<FONT FACE="Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:14.0px'>Dear List Members:<BR>
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A brief note of thanks to Prof. Hoffman for so generously extending the “life” of this query by chauffeuring it along in engaging ways. I am sharing his (and others) remarks with Daniel Burkus, author of the chanoyu-to-wa blog who is not a member of this list and, further, with those who are members of wakeiseijaku, an open listerv of chanoyu practitioners. I welcome any further contributions on the subject through this list or privately.<BR>
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Hope you are all weathering the summer (or winter!) climate with some level of appreciation for a gentle breeze or rain in refreshing amounts.<BR>
<BR>
Lauren<BR>
</SPAN></FONT><FONT SIZE="2"><FONT FACE="Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:12.0px'>-- <BR>
Lauren W. Deutsch<BR>
835 S. Lucerne Blvd., #103<BR>
Los Angeles CA 90005<BR>
Tel 323 930-2587 Cell 323 775-7454<BR>
E lwdeutsch@earthlink.net<BR>
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<HR ALIGN=CENTER SIZE="3" WIDTH="95%"><B>From: </B>Frank Hoffmann <hoffmann@koreaweb.ws><BR>
<B>Reply-To: </B>Frank Hoffmann <hoffmann@koreaweb.ws>, Korean Studies Discussion List <koreanstudies@koreaweb.ws><BR>
<B>Date: </B>Sat, 11 Aug 2012 01:49:44 -0700<BR>
<B>To: </B>Korean Studies Discussion List <koreanstudies@koreaweb.ws><BR>
<B>Subject: </B>[KS] Korean Tea Ceremony and other wonders<BR>
<BR>
Dear Lauren, dear All:<BR>
<BR>
Just a few notes about the topic tea ceremony in Korea. I had hoped <BR>
someone more into that subject would get out of the closet. Nobody felt <BR>
like doing so, except for Kenneth Robinson's interesting <BR>
response--well, summer time it is.<BR>
<BR>
Tea ceremony AND/OR its absence in Korea is an immensely central issue <BR>
for Korean art history. More accurately said, it should be an immensely <BR>
central issue. I have not seen anyone addressing it, and that as such <BR>
is a little scary in my eyes. What I really mean is the theme "art <BR>
market and trade/exchange" in traditional times (in Japan that relates <BR>
directly to the theme tea ceremony, during Meiji times at least). <BR>
<BR>
Let me explain: To start with, this being an email discussion list I <BR>
try to make it short and to the point, and a little 'rough' in order to <BR>
get the main argument out. Of course, I am open to discuss this in much <BR>
more detail, if you bring up any details. <BR>
Before the 1990s none of us, I suppose, will have heard of a "KOREAN <BR>
tea ceremony"--am I wrong? And have you heard about a "KOREAN garden <BR>
culture" before the 1990s? There are then three possible explanations <BR>
for this:<BR>
<BR>
…...….<BR>
- ASSUMPTION (A): Cultures of tea ceremony and garden culture were <BR>
always there, but they had only recently (maybe since the colonial <BR>
period) been suppressed and were "rediscovered" in the 1990s. <BR>
- ASSUMPTION (B): Tea ceremony and garden culture were very vibrant and <BR>
important in Korea but these cultures pretty much disappeared during <BR>
the late Chosŏn period, and only from the 1990s onwards were they <BR>
"revitalized." <BR>
- ASSUMPTION (C): There was nothing like a Korean "tea ceremony" or <BR>
something worth the term "garden culture" after the Koryŏ period. With <BR>
over five centuries of complete interruption still talking about a <BR>
Korean tea ceremony and about garden culture is not a revitalization <BR>
but an invention.<BR>
…...….<BR>
<BR>
>From a historical and art historical point of view I do argue for <BR>
ASSUMPTION (C), while the mainstream Korean media (and all kind of <BR>
government organizations, museums, etc.) seem very hard to propagate <BR>
ASSUMPTION (B). If we try to leave the microcosm of all the "influence <BR>
from Korea" arguments that were given in that quoted blog <BR>
(<a href="http://chanoyu-to-wa.tumblr.com/)">http://chanoyu-to-wa.tumblr.com/)</a> and focus for a moment on the bigger <BR>
picture and trust our gut instinct a little more, then one thing <BR>
catches our attention immediately: Considering that Korea sticks out as <BR>
a culture that is recording all and everything considered "cultured" <BR>
and important (high culture) in written form, why would there be almost <BR>
nothing on tea ceremony and garden culture to be found? What we do have <BR>
does relate to the country's Buddhist period, to Silla and Koryŏ, not <BR>
to the Chosŏn period. Even during the Koryŏ period, when the Buddhist <BR>
aristocracy appreciated tea, was there an active resistance by peasants <BR>
against tea harvesting, because Korea simply did not have the climate <BR>
for the kind of green teas that (according to the Indian and Chinese <BR>
models) the Buddhist rulers wanted--this is East Asia, after all, and <BR>
not South East Asia. With the decline of the Buddhist power base, with <BR>
the dynastic change, green tea did disappear in Korea. At the very <BR>
hight of Korean 'high culture,' in the 18th century, there was hardly <BR>
any trace of it left. As we also know, during the follow-up times of <BR>
cultural decline, the entire 19th century, any output related to <BR>
Buddhist culture (painting, sculpture) then rather took the shape of <BR>
'low culture,' peasant culture, where even central pieces like Maitreya <BR>
sculptures look by any means of technical skill very poor (what we <BR>
might consider "folkloristic"--another problematic term). <BR>
<BR>
What the author of the quoted blog confuses is the Japanese import of <BR>
Korean ceramic wares and how these were used in Korea itself. Also, <BR>
please note that drinking tea in monasteries is not equal to "tea <BR>
ceremony"--that already starts with the kind of tea that is being <BR>
consumed. Furthermore, chanoyu in Japan--in the sense we refer to it <BR>
today, in its union with calligraphy and poetry, flower arrangements, <BR>
and its relation to garden culture, all that is an innovation of the <BR>
early modern age! And here we come to another highly essential point, <BR>
and that is why I said earlier that tea ceremony (and its absence in <BR>
Korea) SHOULD BE such an essential point to look into for Korean art <BR>
history: power and market, and related to this art exchange and trade, <BR>
and of course the production of art and changes in 'taste' and <BR>
etiquette. When looking at the current news we see that "ceremony" is <BR>
always, in one way or another, directly related to power, religion, and <BR>
state--always to all three of these: see the mimicry of a ceremony by <BR>
the Russian punk group "Pussy Riot" <BR>
(<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LW-JbhBCouE).">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LW-JbhBCouE).</a> What will it be for them, <BR>
three years in prison? The state reacted, and the church followed up <BR>
(<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phTg0RB87M4).">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phTg0RB87M4).</a> In Koryŏ, tea ceremony <BR>
was certainly one of the many ways the elite enacted its power by <BR>
showing its cultural superiority, this in line with Chinese and <BR>
Buddhist rituals. (I am sure Professors Robert Buswell and Ed Shultz <BR>
can tell us in much more eloquent ways.) And if we look at historical <BR>
Japan, tea ceremony served the new elite to demonstrate their <BR>
empowerment, a tool of representing power through culture also for <BR>
merchants and early modern industrialists, otherwise not the usual <BR>
suspects for cultured leaders, and in Korea that would also not be the <BR>
case in later times (which is already an important difference between <BR>
the two countries in early modern times). In a seminar on chanoyu and <BR>
art (thanks to Cherie Wendelken, wherever she is) I once read a book by <BR>
Christine Guth on that topic, _Art, Tea, and Industry: Masuda Takashi <BR>
and the Mitsui Circle_ (1993). Mitsui, for example, as you remember, <BR>
was and still is one of the biggest Japanese industrial dynasties, <BR>
comparable to e.g. the German Krupp family, since Edo active in weapons <BR>
production, war crimes, education, art collecting, banking, and tea <BR>
ceremony. [Small image excursion --> <BR>
<a href="http://www.neolook.com/archives/2001092202a.jpg">http://www.neolook.com/archives/2001092202a.jpg</a> "Mitsui with his <BR>
industries," 1935, by Korean artist Pae Unsŏng] When we talk about art <BR>
collections, and the important issue of art production and art markets <BR>
during the Meiji period, tea ceremony then plays a central role in all <BR>
this. It all connects. We can well say that tea ceremony and garden <BR>
culture were directly responsible for 'creating' art and an art market <BR>
in Japan; it led to the taste we now usually consider as "typical <BR>
Japanese"--as what Japanese institutions like to propagate overseas as <BR>
typical Japanese also. None of that (!) happened in Korea, no art <BR>
market around tea ceremony. No tea! (Maybe the British had otherwise <BR>
occupied it and not the Japanese.) Green tea entered Korea again with <BR>
the colonial period and the Japanese. If you have other *verifiable* <BR>
information and arguments, please do post concrete info here. The most <BR>
obvious reason why there was no tea ceremony in Korea is of course that <BR>
Buddhism was on the hide ever since Koryŏ with its Buddhist elite <BR>
culture lost to the Yi rulers and their neo-Confucian value system. <BR>
What the Japanese imported from Korea, no doubt there, was ceramic <BR>
wares and tools, but not tea ceremony, UNLESS we talk about the <BR>
pre-14th century period, and then we talk about an entirely different <BR>
"tea ceremony" than the re-invented Japanese one in the early modern <BR>
period. Going back that far in history, and stating that there was an <BR>
uninterrupted tradition of tea would of course mean to accept <BR>
non-verifiable story-telling as history on both sides, Japan and Korea. <BR>
In Japan, at least, it seems people did have a continuous appreciation <BR>
for green tea (with or without ceremony)--not so in Korea.<BR>
<BR>
We still know relatively little about art exchange and the art market <BR>
in 19th century Korea, and not even of it in the economically, socially <BR>
and culturally prosperous 18th century, a situation that is in *stark* <BR>
contrast to what we know about Japan, not to mention European countries <BR>
and city states, were we can fill entire libraries with publications on <BR>
this theme alone. That lack of basic information is also responsible <BR>
for the bombardment with all these junk books, articles, and Korean TV <BR>
reports about the beauty of this or that piece of traditional Korean <BR>
artwork. The money and political power to propagate national art is <BR>
there, the research lacks behind, got a very late start, and is <BR>
nowadays often handicapped by its own government's agitprop approach to <BR>
culture that is beyond good and bad, comical at best. (The many books <BR>
on Korean tea ceremony and garden culture--from what I saw often with <BR>
what looks to me like made-up archaeological 'evidence' is just one <BR>
example.) All the 1980s studies with a Minjung historiographical <BR>
approach--however clumsily and ideologically overstated they may have <BR>
been--at least attempted to produce a view of Korean culture, history, <BR>
and art production from a unique Korean and non-elite (minjung) view. <BR>
These attempts all stopped during the 1990s. The old mode, <BR>
understanding Korean culture in relation to and competing with its <BR>
former colonial power and the West, was reinstated. No? How else can <BR>
someone explain that exactly tea ceremony and garden culture, something <BR>
JAPAN is famous for, and something gone for 500 years in Korea, would <BR>
suddenly got such a weight? One of the exhibitions of the Korean <BR>
National Museum last year was on Peter Paul Rubens' so-called "Korean <BR>
Man" (around 1617) [and other portraits], outside of Korea known under <BR>
the more correct title "Man in Korean costume" (I had researched the <BR>
history of that drawing two decades ago). While all evidence indicates <BR>
that the actual model Rubens used was a Jesuit missionary to China, <BR>
same as for the other men in Chinese costume in the same series, here <BR>
possibly Nicolas Trigault (alias Kin Nige, 1577-1628), the National <BR>
Museum marks this as a KOREAN man in Korean costume, obviously to show <BR>
that there was an early contact between Korea and Europe. A detail that <BR>
has a huge propagandistic effect. (related article in Korean newspaper: <BR>
<a href="http://koreajoongangdaily.joinsmsn.com/news/article/html/918/2941918.html">http://koreajoongangdaily.joinsmsn.com/news/article/html/918/2941918.html</a> <BR>
) Such historical misrepresentation DOES have its effects world-wide. <BR>
The Getty Museum has now revised its description accordingly, partially <BR>
at least, the title is still "Man in Korean costume" and not "Korean <BR>
Man": <a href="http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=58">http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=58</a> ). <BR>
In that same line we now also find that Korea has now its very own <BR>
"Renaissance"--formerly being something we remember did occur in Italy <BR>
and thereafter elsewhere in Europe. Just a harmless little term? <BR>
Really? I find it pathetic beyond description--and trust me, I *do* <BR>
appreciate and love Korean art, am not trying to minimize Korean art <BR>
here whatsoever--to see an exhibition catalog from the Met on the _Art <BR>
of the KOREAN RENAISSANCE_ in the Uffizi in Florence, right next to <BR>
books on Lorenzo de' Medici and 150 meters away from Michelangelo's <BR>
David. (At the Met it is in the section on East Asia, next to _One <BR>
Thousand Years of Manga_.) What counts are the 'one thousand years,' <BR>
either way. Is that what's needed to be "equal"? <BR>
<BR>
Greetings from Venice (believed to be an old Korean city in Italy),<BR>
Frank Hoffmann<BR>
<BR>
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<BR>
--------------------------------------<BR>
Frank Hoffmann<BR>
<a href="http://koreaweb.ws">http://koreaweb.ws</a><BR>
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