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Tibetan Legacy: Paintings from the Hahn Kwang-ho
Collection
This exhibition of Tibetan banner paintings, thang-kas, is drawn
from the collection of Dr. Hahn Kwang-ho, of Seoul. Tibetan
painting is primarily religious and draws on the rich reservoir
of Buddhist tradition as received in Tibet from India from the
8th century onwards. While most of the thang-kas in the
exhibition are of much later date (18th to 20th century), they
nevertheless draw on these earlier ideas. Buddhism saw a
distinctive development in Tibet and has received increasing
interest from the public over the last twenty years. The
painting's subject matter ranges from the compassionate goddess
Tara to the terrifying guardian figures, and from the remarkable
sequence of circular diagrams representing the celestial zones,
known as mandalas, to the religious traditions of non-Buddhist
Tibet, Bon. The idea of making paintings of this type to
be used in the practice of meditation, as an aid to concentrate
upon one particular deity or teaching, was certainly brought to
Tibet with the very earliest of the missionaries from India in
the late centuries of the first millennium AD. All of the
paintings are in the thang-ka format, of paint on cotton mounted
in silk brocade and suspended from wooden rollers.
Dr. Hahn is a well-known collector in Korea and has also been
an enthusiastic supporter of the Korea collections in the
British Museum. Examples of works of art acquired through his
generosity can be viewed in the Korea Gallery (Room 67).
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