Today we went to the Korean National Art Museum. The museum was very interesting to me, especially because the art work there seemed so different than the art work you see in most western art museums, which are the only art museums that I had been to before today. By far, my favorite part of the art museum was the section on the top floor dedicated to Buddhist statues and some of the history of Buddhism, both in Korea and throughout Asia. I enjoyed seeing all of the different kinds of Buddhist statues and reading about their significance and what sort special meaning each one had, as well as learning some of the different hand gestures that the statues are always making and what some of them mean.
As a foreigner, another thing that I really liked about the museum and one thing that I think most other foreigners appreciated a lot, was that all of the displays had both Korean and English descriptions next to them. This, along with the fact that all of the employees at the museum spoke Korean and English, made the museum a very welcoming and inviting place for foreigners to go visit and enabled us to understand the culture attached to the art works without having to pay a tour guide to walk us around and translate everything for us. I think there is a very strong correlation between culture and art and I see art as a way of expressing and preserving one's culture, so I feel that by creating a museum that was this friendly towards foreigners, it goes a long way in spreading their culture and allows non-Korean speakers like myself to better understand it.
Buddha Statue at the Museum
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