An order of Buddhist monks in South Korea were shocked in the summer of 1989 when their temple was ransacked during a violent thunderstorm. Thieves had posed as hikers to enter the grounds of the Bomunsa temple in the North Gyeongsang province, and they sped away in a beige van with four sacred paintings.
For years, guilt and anguish haunted the temple’s abbot, Ham Tae-wan. Two of the stolen paintings were eventually recovered in 2014 after an extensive search in South Korea, and the thieves were prosecuted. But the trail of the last two paintings ran cold. More years passed, and the abbot became despondent.
“I have blamed myself for failing to safeguard these Buddhist paintings that are objects of faith in Korea,” he wrote in a letter. “Not just art.”
Then, in 2023, Korean government officials discovered something surprising: One of the missing paintings appeared in the online collections database for the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, listed under the wrong title. Officials alerted the monks.
In August of that year, the museum received a letter from Jinwoo, president of the Jogye Order, Korea’s largest sect of Buddhism. “I hope that the museum will work with us amicably on this matter so this sacred Buddhist painting can be returned,” the president said.
It is never a positive story when a stolen religious object from Asia is discovered in a Western museum. But the tale of the painting’s return is an example of how Western cultural institutions can sometimes use the repatriation process to mend relationships with cultural and religious groups in other parts of the world.
At the Smart Museum, news that the Buddhist painting might be stolen came as Vanja Malloy was just settling into her role as the institution’s director, having been there for less than a year. Over the next year, she would oversee the return of the piece to the monks and secure a $2.45 million grant from the Lilly Endowment, a nonprofit founded by the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical family, to improve the museum’s research on the provenance of art and religious objects.
“Through the whole repatriation process, I kept thinking: What did the museum miss?” Malloy said.
It turned out that the museum had little documentation on the painting’s provenance beyond a brief email from a New York gallery to the curator who acquired the painting in 2009. The email said the gallery had bought it from a private collector in California in the late 1980s.
Malloy said the museum plans to use part of the grant money to create an open-access resource for provenance research and to update its own provenance policies. (The museum is working with the university’s Martin Marty Center for the Advanced Study of Religion on the project.) “This grant gives us an opportunity to not just play defensively when things like this come up, but to be leaders and ask what resources people need,” she said.
Last November, the Smart Museum handed the painting over to a delegation of robed monks in an emotional ceremony in Chicago. “When they saw the work, they immediately knelt and started praying,” Malloy said. “Everyone who saw it was moved. It made me think about the significance of these religious objects in our collection, and how they still have so much meaning to their communities.”
Other museums have made a show of repatriations, hosting elaborate ceremonies and speeches with foreign dignitaries to smooth over accusations of smuggling and theft.
In February, the Metropolitan Museum of Art returned a bronze head of a griffin from ancient Greece by handing the artifact over to the country’s culture minister, Lina Mendoni; the bronze had been stolen from an archaeological museum in Olympia in the 1930s. And when the Stanley Museum in Iowa returned several Benin bronzes in 2024, officials traveled to the royal palace in Benin to deliver the objects to representatives of the king.
The Smart Museum went an extra step by providing a paper trail of how the sacred painting came to be in its collection. In 2009, a senior curator, Richard Born, started negotiations to buy the artwork from an Upper East Side gallery called the Kang Collection, the museum said.
The art dealer, Keum Ja Kang, described the painting in a purchase order as an artwork from the 1770s called “Indra and the Dragon General,” and said it featured two Hindu deities that were incorporated into the Mahayana branch of Buddhism.
When Born inquired about the artwork’s provenance, Kang said in an email that the gallery had acquired the painting “in the late 1980s” from a private collector in California. A couple of months later, the museum completed the purchase for $85,000.
The art gallery went out of business during the pandemic, and Keum Ja Kang declined to comment on the painting’s provenance, citing health issues, her son, Peter Kang, said.
Malloy said that Born, the curator, who is retired and did not respond to requests for comment, appeared to have followed the museum’s collection-management rules at the time. Those rules required a higher level of scrutiny for archaeological objects than for an 18th-century painting century like the “Sinjungdo.” She said that changes have since been made to the museum’s guidelines, with more updates to come based on research from the Lilly Endowment grant project.
The Kang Collection was once one of the most prominent dealers of Korean art in the United States. It placed works in prestigious museums across the country, including the Met Museum, the Chicago Institute of Art, the Harvard Art Museums and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Many of those museums have stepped up their research into Asian antiquities in recent years, including the Harvard Art Museums. Jennifer Aubin, a spokeswoman, referred to the museums’ provenance guidelines that describe efforts to thoroughly research objects.
Karen Frascona, a spokeswoman for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, said that provenance for artifacts from the Kang Collection was available on the institution’s website.
A spokeswoman for the Met Museum said that objects from the Kang Collection gallery “will be included as part of the museum’s ongoing collection research.”
“We have no reason to believe that any of these works were lost or stolen in the past,” she said.
The Kang Collection has not been linked to many other stolen pieces. One exception was a second sacred Buddhist painting, known as the “Jijang Siwangdo,” that it sold to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1994.
The Los Angeles museum decided to return the painting to the Jogye Order in July 2017 after the monks provided proof it had been stolen nearly two decades earlier from the Yeombulan Hermitage, a South Korean monastery. In that case, the Kang Gallery had acquired the painting around 1990 from a private New York collector, who could not recall the name of the seller from whom he had bought it, according to the museum.
“Twenty years ago, you trusted that galleries had a due process,” said Gay-Young Cho, a longtime member of the Smart Museum’s board of governors who also sits on acquisition boards for other institutions including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. “Now at our collections meetings, there is always a question of what is the provenance of a particular piece.”
The monks, to prove their case, provided the Smart Museum in late 2023 with catalogs of Buddhist cultural properties that had been stolen through the years, each featuring the missing painting from Bomunsa temple. “When it is again enshrined in its original place, serving its sacred purpose and being honored by the Buddhist faithful, it will shine even brighter,” Jinwoo said in a note attached to the catalogs.
Malloy and the museum’s researchers found the evidence convincing. “It was pretty clear,” said Malloy. “That was our painting in their temple.”
Smart Museum officials also learned that the figures in the painting were inaccurately identified. Jinwoo, the Jogye Order’s president, said that the artwork had been painted in 1767 and included the deities Indra and Kumara — not Indra and the Dragon General, as the Kang gallery had reported. Jinwoo said the artwork should be correctly referred to as “Sinjungdo,” which is a sacred painting depicting Buddhism’s divine guardians, to reflect its central use in religious ceremonies and prayer.
After months of research, consultation with the university’s legal department and advice from the Korean consulate in Chicago, the painting was scheduled for return. Monks from the Jogye Order traveled to the Smart Museum in November 2024 to reclaim the artwork.
Cho, who participated in negotiations as a translator for the museum, explained why the monks fell to their knees and bowed when they saw the long-lost painting. “That gesture is reserved in Korean tradition for elders and those who are deeply revered,” she said. “It felt like they were welcoming home a long lost teacher or ancestor.”
The painting is now safely back in the Paradise Hall of the Bomunsa temple, along with the other two recovered artworks, said Yoo Daeho, a spokesman for the Jogye Order’s cultural affairs office.
Zachary Small is a Times reporter writing about the art world’s relationship to money, politics and technology.
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