Visiting the Hall of Ancient Masters of Shilluksa, South Korea Julian Haladyn
o n a very hot summer day in South Korea, Miriam Jordan and I took a bus from our village of Bubal to Shilluksa, a Buddhist temple site in the neighboring town of Yoju. We had visited this site once before in the winter, but wanted to see it again before returning to Canada. In the middle of Shilluksa is a small- scale temple called the Hall of Ancient Masters or Chosadang. Built between 1468-69, during the Choson period, this little Buddhist hall is quite a simple looking structure, especially in comparison to the larger and more elaborate buildings within the same complex. It is painted in the same brightly coloured traditional pattern character- istic of Korean Buddhist temples. The feature that makes this Hall unique is the fact that it has no main supporting beam; instead the weight of the structure is held up by a series of smaller interlaced beams that spread out the distribution of the weight evenly. This has the effect of making the physi- cal structure of the Hall appear to disintegrate. With no single point supporting the weight of the building, entering the architectural space of the Hall becomes a Buddhist experience of nothingness. In the open space of the Hall — which I enter only after removing my shoes — the interlaced ceiling dissipates any sense of weight that the structure may have, while simultaneously accenting the materiality of the architectural elements themselves. This can be seen in the use of heavy corner brackets. This contradiction captures the Buddhist sense of nothingness within the architectonic lan- guage of Chosadang, in which the structure of the Hall appears weightless by drawing atten- tion to its physicality.
I had to sit in the Hall for a while to figure this one out.
Julian Haladyn is an artist, writer and curator in London, Ontario. In 1997 he studied traditional Korean painting under LeeYoung-Hwan in Ichon, South Korea. He shared the position of Visual Arts Coordinator at the Forest City Gallery with Miriam Jordan, June 2002 to Febru- ary 2003. He is presently enrolled in Goddard College’s MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts program in Vermont.
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