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Straits Times
14-06-2025
- General
- Straits Times
Stolen from Buddhist monks, sacred painting is returned by Chicago museum
CHICAGO - An order of Buddhist monks in South Korea was shocked in the summer of 1989 when its temple was ransacked during a violent thunderstorm. Thieves had posed as hikers to enter the grounds of the Bomunsa temple in the North Gyeongsang province, and they sped away in a beige van with four sacred paintings. For years, guilt and anguish haunted the temple's abbot Ham Tae-wan . Two of the stolen paintings were eventually recovered in 2014 after an extensive search in South Korea, and the thieves were prosecuted. But the trail of the last two paintings ran cold. More years passed, and the abbot became despondent. 'I have blamed myself for failing to safeguard these Buddhist paintings that are objects of faith in Korea,' he wrote in a letter. 'Not just art.' Then, in 2023, Korean government officials discovered something surprising: one of the missing paintings appeared in the online collections database for the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, listed under the wrong title. Officials alerted the monks. In August 2023 , the museum received a letter from Venerable Jinwoo, president of the Jogye Order, Korea's largest sect of Buddhism. 'I hope that the museum will work with us amicably on this matter so this sacred Buddhist painting can be returned,' the president said. It is never a positive story when a stolen religious object from Asia is discovered in a Western museum. But the tale of the painting's return is an example of how Western cultural institutions can sometimes use the repatriation process to mend relationships with cultural and religious groups in other parts of the world. At the Smart Museum, news that the Buddhist painting might be stolen came as the institution's director Vanja Malloy was just settling into her role, having been there for less than a year. Over the next year, she would oversee the return of the piece to the monks and secure a $2.45 million (S$3.14 million) grant from the Lilly Endowment, a non-profit founded by the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical family, to improve the museum's research on the provenance of art and religious objects. 'Through the whole repatriation process, I kept thinking: What did the museum miss?' said Ms Malloy. It turned out that the museum had little documentation on the painting's provenance beyond a brief email from a New York gallery to the curator who acquired the painting in 2009. The email said the gallery had bought it from a private collector in California in the late 1980s. Ms Malloy said the museum plans to use part of the grant money to create an open-access resource for provenance research and to update its own provenance policies. (The museum is working with the university's Martin Marty Center for the Advanced Study of Religion on the project.) 'This grant gives us an opportunity to not just play defensively when things like this come up, but to be leaders and ask what resources people need,' she said. In November 2024 , the Smart Museum handed the painting over to a delegation of robed monks in an emotional ceremony in Chicago. 'When they saw the work, they immediately knelt and started praying,' Ms Malloy said. 'Everyone who saw it was moved. It made me think about the significance of these religious objects in our collection, and how they still have so much meaning to their communities.' Other museums have made a show of repatriations, hosting elaborate ceremonies and speeches with foreign dignitaries to smooth over accusations of smuggling and theft. In February, the Metropolitan Museum of Art returned a bronze head of a griffin from ancient Greece by handing the artefact over to the country's culture minister Lina Mendoni ; the bronze had been stolen from an archaeological museum in Olympia in the 1930s. And when the Stanley Museum in Iowa returned several Benin bronzes in 2024, officials travelled to the royal palace in Benin to deliver the objects to representatives of the king. The Smart Museum provided a paper trail of how the sacred painting came to be in its collection. In 2009, a senior curator, Mr Richard Born, started negotiations to buy the artwork from an Upper East Side gallery called the Kang Collection, the museum said. The art dealer, Mrs Keum Ja Kang, described the painting in a purchase order as an artwork from the 1770s called 'Indra and the Dragon General' and said it featured two Hindu deities that were incorporated into the Mahayana branch of Buddhism. When Mr Born inquired about the artwork's provenance, Mrs Kang said in an email that the gallery had acquired the painting 'in the late 1980s' from a private collector in California. A couple of months later, the museum completed the purchase for $85,000. The art gallery went out of business during the pandemic, and Mrs Kang declined to comment on the painting's provenance, citing health issues, said her son Peter Kang. Ms Malloy said that Mr Born, the curator, who is retired and did not respond to requests for comment, appeared to have followed the museum's collection management rules at the time. Those rules required a higher level of scrutiny for archaeological objects than for an 18th-century painting century like the 'Sinjungdo.' She said that changes have since been made to the museum's guidelines, with more updates to come based on research from the Lilly Endowment grant project. The Kang Collection was once one of the most prominent dealers of Korean art in the United States. It placed works in prestigious museums across the country, including the Met Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Harvard Art Museums and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Many of those museums have stepped up their research into Asian antiquities in recent years, including the Harvard Art Museums. The museums' spokesperson Jennifer Aubin referred to their provenance guidelines that describe efforts to thoroughly research objects. Ms Karen Frascona, a spokesperson for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, said that provenance for artefacts from the Kang Collection was available on the institution's website. 'We have no reason to believe that any of these works were lost or stolen in the past,' she said. A spokesperson for the Met Museum said that objects from the Kang Collection gallery 'will be included as part of the museum's ongoing collection research.' The Kang Collection has not been linked to many other stolen pieces. One exception was a second sacred Buddhist painting, known as the 'Jijang Siwangdo,' that it sold to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1994. The Los Angeles museum decided to return the painting to the Jogye Order in July 2017 after the monks provided proof it had been stolen nearly two decades earlier from the Yeombulan Hermitage, a South Korean monastery. In that case, the Kang Gallery had acquired the painting around 1990 from a private New York collector, who could not recall the name of the seller from whom he had bought it, according to the museum. 'Twenty years ago, you trusted that galleries had a due process,' said Ms Gay-Young Cho, a longtime member of the Smart Museum's board of governors , who also sits on acquisition boards for other institutions including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. 'Now at our collections meetings, there is always a question of what is the provenance of a particular piece.' The monks, to prove their case, provided the Smart Museum in late 2023 with catalogues of Buddhist cultural properties that had been stolen through the years, each featuring the missing painting from Bomunsa temple. 'When it is again enshrined in its original place, serving its sacred purpose and being honoured by the Buddhist faithful, it will shine even brighter,' Ven Jinwoo said in a note attached to the catalogues . Ms Malloy and the museum's researchers found the evidence convincing. 'It was pretty clear,' said Ms Malloy. 'That was our painting in their temple.' Smart Museum officials also learned that the figures in the painting were inaccurately identified. Ven Jinwoo, the Jogye Order's president, said that the artwork had been painted in 1767 and included the deities Indra and Kumara – not Indra and the Dragon General, as the Kang gallery had reported. Ven Jinwoo said the artwork should be correctly referred to as 'Sinjungdo,' which is a sacred painting depicting Buddhism's divine guardians, to reflect its central use in religious ceremonies and prayer. After months of research, consultation with the university's legal department and advice from the Korean Consulate in Chicago, the painting was scheduled for return. Monks from the Jogye Order travelled to the Smart Museum in November 2024 to reclaim the artwork. Ms Cho, who participated in negotiations as a translator for the museum, explained why the monks fell to their knees and bowed when they saw the long-lost painting. 'That gesture is reserved in Korean tradition for elders and those who are deeply revered,' she said. 'It felt like they were welcoming home a long lost teacher or ancestor.' The painting is now safely back in the Paradise Hall of the Bomunsa temple, along with the other two recovered artworks, said spokesperson for the Jogye Order's cultural affairs office Yoo Daeho . NYTIMES Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.
Chicago Tribune
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Major Theaster Gates retrospective to open at the Smart Museum this fall
You know who's never had a big solo museum show in his own hometown? Strange as this sounds: Theaster Gates, the renowned, longtime Chicago artist, sculptor, community developer, collector, painter and all-around renaissance man. That's why, beginning Sept. 23, the Smart Museum of Art (5550 S. Greenwood Ave.) at the University of Chicago in Hyde Park will open a landmark mid-career retrospective of Gates' far-flung art practices, using most of the museum's space, drawing on his paintings, pottery, films, installations and reclamation projects. 'Theaster Gates: Unto Thee,' set to run through Feb. 22, 2026, will be the first large-scale attempt by a Chicago institution to place a traditional museum framework around a local artist best known for 20 years of non-traditional, not-always-gallery-obvious works. How, after all, can a gallery develop a retrospective of an artist whose acclaim often derives from the transformation of South Side communities? Depending on the critic, Gates, 51, a professor of visual art at the University of Chicago, is a land artist. Or he occupies the social practice niche of the arts world. Or he's an essayist revisiting little-known histories using salvaged materials. Or he's just an ambitious archivist. ArtReview called Gates a 'poster boy for socially engaged art.' England's Tate Liverpool museum described him as no less than 'one of the world's most influential living artists.' Yet he's not often shown in Chicago. He began as a potter and has since created hundreds of installations, paintings and sculptures, but Gates is still best known for remaking a series of bungalows in the Dorchester neighborhood into sort-of living artworks, employing the reclaimed materials from those buildings and making room for local artists. He's bought up the entire stock of a fading record store. He's acted as preservationist for the last remnants of Johnson Publishing (the Chicago home of Ebony and Jet magazines). In 2015, he reopened a 1923 savings and loan as the Stony Island Arts Bank, a combination exhibition space, library, archive and home to the Rebuild Foundation, his group focused on using arts and culture to revitalize disinvested Chicago spaces. In a quiet spot on Stony Island Avenue, beside the bank, is the gazebo in which 12-year-old Tamir Rice was killed by Cleveland police in 2014. Gates reclaimed that, too. How, in other words, does a museum do justice to that inside gallery walls? The Smart's answer is by mingling Gates' creations with his reclaimed projects, then expanding the exhibition into a number of the places developed by Gates, many of which are only blocks away from the institution. 'A traditional museum show keeps most of its programming inside the museum,' said Smart Director Vanja Malloy. 'But the experience of some of the places Theaster invested in is really only captured by going there.' Programming will sprawl to Stony Island and beyond; the opening reception will happen simultaneously at the Smart and Gates' other spaces. This is not, of course, Gates' first substantial exhibition. Far from it. The Museum of Contemporary Art, in 2013, hosted a large installation by Gates of repurposed pews from Bond Chapel at the University of Chicago. He's had major showings at the Venice Biennale, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and countless international galleries. A 2007 solo show at the Hyde Park Art Center focused on dozens of Gates' clay plates. 'Unto Thee,' though, will showcase new paintings, sculptures and films, beside such reclamation works as Bond's church pews, a chunk of Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, the personal library of University of Chicago Slavic language professor Robert Bird. Part of Gates' practice has been repurposing artifacts and collections cast off by the university. 'People talk about the art world like it's a monolith,' Gates said, 'and maybe Chicago institutions just had a specific sense of who was important at various moments. Plus, I am from Chicago but my studies were in Iowa, at Harvard, in South Africa. And I didn't go to art school. I was without a (museum) cohort in Chicago. People early in my career would ask what was there to buy? It was a badge of honor I led with ideas, though since those days, I've had a significant practice making objects. It just played out elsewhere. When I came home, I feel more like a nonprofit leader.' Indeed, if there's a theme in Gates' work, it's the stories and echoes heard from objects and materials those objects are made from. The exhibition will feature, for instance, glass slides Gates recovered from the art history department. Of 60,000 slides, only 50 were of African art; those were also marked 'primitive.' For the lobby of the Smart, Gates is creating a new installation using more than 350 African masks he recently acquired. Some are masterful works, but others are tourist trinkets, and when he bought the collection, both disposable and important were mixed together. 'I grew up in a situation where my mom and dad pointed towards happiness whenever they were broke,' he said. 'We would go to Mississippi in the summer and it wasn't a question of do we repair our old barn or get a new one. A new one wasn't an option. See, when obsolescence is not an option, you look more closely at what you have. My parents were hoarders, they just understood there is more life in a thing than most of us attribute. My practice is partly the demonstration of appreciating the things you have.' The retrospective, co-curated by Malloy and curator Galina Mardilovich, is the first exhibition that Malloy, a rising star in the museum scene, developed for the Smart after becoming director in 2022. Next year, she's leading the first Midwest exhibition of the Japanese collective teamLab, known for its immersive, science-based installations. Malloy, whose doctorate in art history considered the ways modern science influenced modern art, imagines 'the next chapter for the Smart going beyond Humanities. How do we partner with physics? Computer science? Chemistry?' She also anticipates a renewed commitment from the Smart, now in its 50th year, to local artists. 'I got to know Theaster when I was approached for this job,' she said. 'Until then I hadn't really appreciated the depth to which Chicago influenced his work or how he influenced the city. I asked him if he ever had a big solo museum show. When he said no, that sounded like a lost opportunity. I'm saying this as an outsider who only moved to the city two and half years ago, but perhaps Chicago didn't appreciate what it had?'
