Oriental Sublime: Sŏkkuram in the Japanese Imperial Landscape

Abstract:The purpose of the present article is to demonstrate that Sŏkkuram attained its status as a work of art through Japanese and Korean intellectuals’ efforts to invent or elevate the East and that the eulogy of its art was involved in the self-legitimizing and self-aggrandizing culture of imperial Japan. The sculptures of the grotto were not disconnected from the context of Buddhist ceremonies and practices and discussed in terms of art until they became the object of Japanese critical discourse accommodating western notions of art. Yanagi Muneyoshi, the author of the first critical essay ever written on Sŏkkuram as a work of art, tried to explain its formal features and their significance from a viewpoint of romantic and Blakean art and assumed as its characterizing and inclusive category an Eastern art which had held its unifying ground in Buddhism. His analysis of Sŏkkuram was in line with attempts to invent Buddhist art in correspondence to Christian art and, ultimately, the East to the West. In his “Sunset,” a short-story set against Kyŏngju, Yi T’ae-jun was interested in capturing what he himself had called “Eastern sentiment” evoked by the historic remains in the old capital city of Silla and located its consummation in the sublimity of Sŏkkuram. Compared to the eleven-faced-Kwanŭm bodhisattva in the text, the heroine T’aok is not just an embodiment of compassion toward all mortal beings, but also a symbol of a new East that was the dominant theme of Japanese wartime ideology. As Japan’s war intensified, and as the culture of imperial Japan took a fascist turn, the aesthetic of Sŏkkuram became irrevocably politicized. Buddhism, the source of elevating representations of the grotto, served in the war effort in the form of Imperial-Way Buddhism. The aesthetic of Oriental sublime was thus inseparably entangled with Japanese imperialist fantasies.