Reviving a beauty
seven centuries old

Most surviving Goryeo Buddhist paintings date to the late Goryeo dynasty, the 13th and 14th centuries. They were commissioned by the ruling class and enshrined in temples and homes as objects of devotion. Roughly 160 survive in the world today — and the great majority, around 130, are now held in Japan, with the rest scattered through museums in the United States and Europe. Only a small number remain in Korea itself.

The most frequent subjects are the Amitabha Buddha, the Water-Moon Avalokiteshvara, and the Bodhisattva Ksitigarbha — figures whose vocation is to save and to shelter sentient beings. Goryeo painting is distinguished by its luminous color and the refined, elegant line of its figures, with delicate gold-painted patterns on the robes that are a hallmark of the tradition. These are among the most exquisite religious paintings produced anywhere in medieval East Asia.

That so few remain in Korea — and that the survivors are so dispersed — gives the act of reproduction a particular weight. To reproduce a Goryeo painting is, in part, to bring a lost national heritage back within reach.

The iconography of the Water-Moon Avalokiteshvara comes from the Flower Garland Sutra (Avatamsaka Sutra) and its chapter on the Entry into the Dharma Realm. There, Avalokiteshvara — the bodhisattva of infinite compassion — dwells on Mount Potalaka by the southern sea, amid treasures, flowers, and fruit, while saving sentient beings. The pilgrim boy Sudhana seeks out wise teachers, and Avalokiteshvara is among them; the painting depicts their meeting.

The name ‘Water-Moon’ evokes the moon reflected on water — a Buddhist image of a presence at once luminous and impermanent, real and reflected. In the Goryeo composition the bodhisattva is seated in ease upon a rock, draped in a translucent white veil rendered in fine gold line, the whole surface shimmering with the back-coloring method. It became the single most celebrated subject of Goryeo Buddhist painting, though it grew uncommon in the later Joseon period.

To reproduce such an image is to re-enter a vanished sensibility: the proportion, the gesture, the precise warmth of the gold. It is here that Jo Irak has concentrated her two decades of work.

The secret of Goryeo color is the back-coloring method, baechae. Painting on semitransparent silk, the Goryeo masters applied pigment not only to the front but to the reverse of the cloth. Color seen through the weave becomes softer, deeper, more luminous; the technique also anchors the pigment against flaking and fading. It is largely thanks to baechae that the surviving paintings have kept their beauty across seven centuries.

Over this ground the painters laid gold — geumni, powdered gold suspended in glue — drawing the fine patterns of the robes and accentuating jewelry and ornament. The combined effect is the distinctive splendor of Goryeo painting: deep mineral color glowing from within, traced over with a web of gold line.

Reproduction means rebuilding all of this from the original outward: the silk, the pigments, the order of the layers, the exact behavior of gold over color. It is slow, exacting, devotional work — closer to conservation than to making a new picture. Jo Irak joins this campaign not as a subject of its cause but as a fellow artist in solidarity, offering her work so that the proceeds may become a low-interest mutual-aid loan for another artist facing financial exclusion today.