IKS Lecture: Maya Stiller "Staging the Buddha Land: Celestial Child Musicians and Vernacular Performance in Late Chosŏn Buddhist Temples"

This talk examines depictions of celestial musicians in late Chosŏn Buddhist temple interiors. From the eighteenth century onward, youthful male performers increasingly joined 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 spread beyond their institutional settings to private banquet halls and village festivals. Drawing on a relational database of ninety-one temple halls and selected case studies, this talk traces how artists transformed vernacular performance idioms into an architectural image of the Buddha land. In this way, the temple ceiling became a site where Buddhist cosmology was recalibrated through the sensory and social forms of late Chosŏn performance culture.

Maya Stiller is an Associate Professor of Korean Art History & Visual Culture at the University of Kansas. She earned a doctorate in East Asian Art History from Freie Universität Berlin and a Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies from UCLA. Her first book, Carving Status at Kŭmgangsan: Elite Graffiti in Premodern Korea (University of Washington Press, 2021), won the American Historical Association’s Patricia Buckley Ebrey Prize and an honorable mention for the Association for Asian Studies’ James B. Palais Prize. Her current book, Sensing the Buddha Land: Architecture, Murals, and Sound in Late Chosŏn Korea (University of Washington Press, forthcoming 2027), reconstructs the late Chosŏn Buddhist temple hall as a multisensory environment. In 2026-27, Dr. Stiller will be a Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) in Washington D.C.

This talk is co-sponsored by the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures and the Department of History of Art.