[KS] Korean Tea Ceremony and other wonders

Sat Aug 11 04:49:44 EDT 2012

Dear Lauren, dear All:

Just a few notes about the topic tea ceremony in Korea. I had hoped 
someone more into that subject would get out of the closet. Nobody felt 
like doing so, except for Kenneth Robinson's interesting 
response--well, summer time it is.

Tea ceremony AND/OR its absence in Korea is an immensely central issue 
for Korean art history. More accurately said, it should be an immensely 
central issue. I have not seen anyone addressing it, and that as such 
is a little scary in my eyes. What I really mean is the theme "art 
market and trade/exchange" in traditional times (in Japan that relates 
directly to the theme tea ceremony, during Meiji times at least). 

Let me explain: To start with, this being an email discussion list I 
try to make it short and to the point, and a little 'rough' in order to 
get the main argument out. Of course, I am open to discuss this in much 
more detail, if you bring up any details. 
Before the 1990s none of us, I suppose, will have heard of a "KOREAN 
tea ceremony"--am I wrong? And have you heard about a "KOREAN garden 
culture" before the 1990s? There are then three possible explanations 
for this:

…...….
- ASSUMPTION (A): Cultures of tea ceremony and garden culture were 
always there, but they had only recently (maybe since the colonial 
period) been suppressed and were "rediscovered" in the 1990s. 
- ASSUMPTION (B): Tea ceremony and garden culture were very vibrant and 
important in Korea but these cultures pretty much disappeared during 
the late Chosŏn period, and only from the 1990s onwards were they 
"revitalized." 
- ASSUMPTION (C): There was nothing like a Korean "tea ceremony" or 
something worth the term "garden culture" after the Koryŏ period. With 
over five centuries of complete interruption still talking about a 
Korean tea ceremony and about garden culture is not a revitalization 
but an invention.
…...….

From a historical and art historical point of view I do argue for 
ASSUMPTION (C), while the mainstream Korean media (and all kind of 
government organizations, museums, etc.) seem very hard to propagate 
ASSUMPTION (B). If we try to leave the microcosm of all the "influence 
from Korea" arguments that were given in that quoted blog 
(http://chanoyu-to-wa.tumblr.com/) and focus for a moment on the bigger 
picture and trust our gut instinct a little more, then one thing 
catches our attention immediately: Considering that Korea sticks out as 
a culture that is recording all and everything considered "cultured" 
and important (high culture) in written form, why would there be almost 
nothing on tea ceremony and garden culture to be found? What we do have 
does relate to the country's Buddhist period, to Silla and Koryŏ, not 
to the Chosŏn period. Even during the Koryŏ period, when the Buddhist 
aristocracy appreciated tea, was there an active resistance by peasants 
against tea harvesting, because Korea simply did not have the climate 
for the kind of green teas that (according to the Indian and Chinese 
models) the Buddhist rulers wanted--this is East Asia, after all, and 
not South East Asia. With the decline of the Buddhist power base, with 
the dynastic change, green tea did disappear in Korea. At the very 
hight of Korean 'high culture,' in the 18th century, there was hardly 
any trace of it left. As we also know, during the follow-up times of 
cultural decline, the entire 19th century, any output related to 
Buddhist culture (painting, sculpture) then rather took the shape of 
'low culture,' peasant culture, where even central pieces like Maitreya 
sculptures look by any means of technical skill very poor (what we 
might consider "folkloristic"--another problematic term). 

What the author of the quoted blog confuses is the Japanese import of 
Korean ceramic wares and how these were used in Korea itself. Also, 
please note that drinking tea in monasteries is not equal to "tea 
ceremony"--that already starts with the kind of tea that is being 
consumed. Furthermore, chanoyu in Japan--in the sense we refer to it 
today, in its union with calligraphy and poetry, flower arrangements, 
and its relation to garden culture, all that is an innovation of the 
early modern age! And here we come to another highly essential point, 
and that is why I said earlier that tea ceremony (and its absence in 
Korea) SHOULD BE such an essential point to look into for Korean art 
history: power and market, and related to this art exchange and trade, 
and of course the production of art and changes in 'taste' and 
etiquette. When looking at the current news we see that "ceremony" is 
always, in one way or another, directly related to power, religion, and 
state--always to all three of these: see the mimicry of a ceremony by 
the Russian punk group "Pussy Riot" 
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LW-JbhBCouE). What will it be for them, 
three years in prison? The state reacted, and the church followed up 
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phTg0RB87M4). In Koryŏ, tea ceremony 
was certainly one of the many ways the elite enacted its power by 
showing its cultural superiority, this in line with Chinese and 
Buddhist rituals. (I am sure Professors Robert Buswell and Ed Shultz 
can tell us in much more eloquent ways.) And if we look at historical 
Japan, tea ceremony served the new elite to demonstrate their 
empowerment, a tool of representing power through culture also for 
merchants and early modern industrialists, otherwise not the usual 
suspects for cultured leaders, and in Korea that would also not be the 
case in later times (which is already an important difference between 
the two countries in early modern times). In a seminar on chanoyu and 
art (thanks to Cherie Wendelken, wherever she is) I once read a book by 
Christine Guth on that topic, _Art, Tea, and Industry: Masuda Takashi 
and the Mitsui Circle_ (1993). Mitsui, for example, as you remember, 
was and still is one of the biggest Japanese industrial dynasties, 
comparable to e.g. the German Krupp family, since Edo active in weapons 
production, war crimes, education, art collecting, banking, and tea 
ceremony. [Small image excursion --> 
http://www.neolook.com/archives/2001092202a.jpg  "Mitsui with his 
industries," 1935, by Korean artist Pae Unsŏng] When we talk about art 
collections, and the important issue of art production and art markets 
during the Meiji period, tea ceremony then plays a central role in all 
this. It all connects. We can well say that tea ceremony and garden 
culture were directly responsible for 'creating' art and an art market 
in Japan; it led to the taste we now usually consider as "typical 
Japanese"--as what Japanese institutions like to propagate overseas as 
typical Japanese also. None of that (!) happened in Korea, no art 
market around tea ceremony. No tea! (Maybe the British had otherwise 
occupied it and not the Japanese.) Green tea entered Korea again with 
the colonial period and the Japanese. If you have other *verifiable* 
information and arguments, please do post concrete info here. The most 
obvious reason why there was no tea ceremony in Korea is of course that 
Buddhism was on the hide ever since Koryŏ with its Buddhist elite 
culture lost to the Yi rulers and their neo-Confucian value system. 
What the Japanese imported from Korea, no doubt there, was ceramic 
wares and tools, but not tea ceremony, UNLESS we talk about the 
pre-14th century period, and then we talk about an entirely different 
"tea ceremony" than the re-invented Japanese one in the early modern 
period. Going back that far in history, and stating that there was an 
uninterrupted tradition of tea would of course mean to accept 
non-verifiable story-telling as history on both sides, Japan and Korea. 
In Japan, at least, it seems people did have a continuous appreciation 
for green tea (with or without ceremony)--not so in Korea.

We still know relatively little about art exchange and the art market 
in 19th century Korea, and not even of it in the economically, socially 
and culturally prosperous 18th century, a situation that is in *stark* 
contrast to what we know about Japan, not to mention European countries 
and city states, were we can fill entire libraries with publications on 
this theme alone. That lack of basic information is also responsible 
for the bombardment with all these junk books, articles, and Korean TV 
reports about the beauty of this or that piece of traditional Korean 
artwork. The money and political power to propagate national art is 
there, the research lacks behind, got a very late start, and is 
nowadays often handicapped by its own government's agitprop approach to 
culture that is beyond good and bad, comical at best. (The many books 
on Korean tea ceremony and garden culture--from what I saw often with 
what looks to me like made-up archaeological 'evidence' is just one 
example.) All the 1980s studies with a Minjung historiographical 
approach--however clumsily and ideologically overstated they may have 
been--at least attempted to produce a view of Korean culture, history, 
and art production from a unique Korean and non-elite (minjung) view. 
These attempts all stopped during the 1990s. The old mode, 
understanding Korean culture in relation to and competing with its 
former colonial power and the West, was reinstated. No? How else can 
someone explain that exactly tea ceremony and garden culture, something 
JAPAN is famous for, and something gone for 500 years in Korea, would 
suddenly got such a weight? One of the exhibitions of the Korean 
National Museum last year was on Peter Paul Rubens' so-called "Korean 
Man" (around 1617) [and other portraits], outside of Korea known under 
the more correct title "Man in Korean costume" (I had researched the 
history of that drawing two decades ago). While all evidence indicates 
that the actual model Rubens used was a Jesuit missionary to China, 
same as for the other men in Chinese costume in the same series, here 
possibly Nicolas Trigault (alias Kin Nige, 1577-1628), the National 
Museum marks this as a KOREAN man in Korean costume, obviously to show 
that there was an early contact between Korea and Europe. A detail that 
has a huge propagandistic effect. (related article in Korean newspaper: 
http://koreajoongangdaily.joinsmsn.com/news/article/html/918/2941918.html 
) Such historical misrepresentation DOES have its effects world-wide. 
The Getty Museum has now revised its description accordingly, partially 
at least, the title is still "Man in Korean costume" and not "Korean 
Man": http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=58 ). 
In that same line we now also find that Korea has now its very own 
"Renaissance"--formerly being something we remember did occur in Italy 
and thereafter elsewhere in Europe. Just a harmless little term? 
Really? I find it pathetic beyond description--and trust me, I *do* 
appreciate and love Korean art, am not trying to minimize Korean art 
here whatsoever--to see an exhibition catalog from the Met on the _Art 
of the KOREAN RENAISSANCE_ in the Uffizi in Florence, right next to 
books on Lorenzo de' Medici and 150 meters away from Michelangelo's 
David. (At the Met it is in the section on East Asia, next to _One 
Thousand Years of Manga_.) What counts are the 'one thousand years,' 
either way. Is that what's needed to be "equal"? 

Greetings from Venice (believed to be an old Korean city in Italy),
Frank Hoffmann

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Frank Hoffmann
http://koreaweb.ws