Met Museum returns 18th Century Buddhist painting to South Korea

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has returned a Buddhist painting from 1798 to a South Korean temple, acknowledging the work was believed taken while the temple was under U.S. Army control during the Korean War.

A long-awaited comeback: “The Tenth King of Hell” (1798), an ink-on-silk scroll showing one of Buddhism’s 10 judges who determine the fate of the deceased, was formally returned to Sinheungsa Temple in Sokcho, Gangwon province, during a ceremony in Seoul on Nov. 14. This followed a collaborative investigation between the museum, temple representatives and the Sokcho Committee for the Return of Cultural Heritage, who visited the Met multiple times to examine the work’s provenance.

During negotiations, committee chairman Lee Sang-rae told the Chosun Daily that when his group showed Met officials a photograph of U.S. soldiers splitting wooden printing blocks from the temple to make coffee fires, “they were shocked and even teared up.”

Why this matters: The painting’s return addresses how American military occupation enabled cultural displacement during wartime. For Korean Americans, the painting’s repatriation validates that cultural heritage warrants protection even during conflict and that institutions must confront difficult histories about how warfare shaped their collections.

Three more to go: The painting, one of 10 scrolls originally from the temple, was purchased by the museum in 2007 from a Los Angeles collector through art dealer Michael C. Hughes. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art returned six panels in 2020, bringing the total returned to seven. Lee says his committee “will continue our efforts to ensure that the remaining three Ten Kings of the Underworld paintings still abroad can also return home.”

The return follows the Met’s 2023 Cultural Property Initiative, which hired additional provenance researchers and expanded positions from six to 11 under newly appointed Head of Provenance Lucian Simmons. Since launching the initiative, the museum has returned works to Cambodia and Thailand, as well Turkey, Italy and Spain. Beyond institutional efforts, South Korea’s Overseas Korean Cultural Heritage Foundation has documented nearly 248,000 Korean artifacts abroad and successfully repatriated 2,854 objects while also supporting conservation of works that left Korea through legitimate means.