Lindner Lecture: Maya Stiller - Staging the Buddha Land: Celestial Youth Musicians and Vernacular Performance in Late Chosŏn Temple Interiors

When

Thursday, October 15, 6:30 PM to 7:30 PM

Where

Campbell Hall (School of Architecture), Charlottesville

Price

Free

This talk examines the depiction of celestial youth musicians in late Chosŏn Buddhist temple interiors. From the eighteenth century onward, youthful male performers increasingly displaced the female celestials conventionally associated with heavenly music. Their instruments and costumes drew not only on military culture but also on performance idioms that had circulated beyond their institutional origins. Drawing on a relational database of temple halls and selected regional case studies, this talk traces how painter-monks transformed this familiar language of performance into an architectural image of the Buddha land. Instead of representing the actual sound of Buddhist liturgy, these painted ensembles converted the timbres, visual codes, and bodily energies of contemporary spectacle into imagined offerings of music and performance. The temple ceiling became a site where Buddhist cosmology was recalibrated through the sensory and social forms of late Chosŏn performance culture.

Last updated Sunday at 7:07 PM. Details can change; the venue’s page is the authority.