Best Photos of the Day

Korea Exhibition at the British Museum © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Korea Exhibition © The Trustees of the British Museum.

In the Buddhist world, copying or commissioning a sacred sutra is an act of profound devotion. This chapter of the Flower Garland Sutra follows Sudhana's search for enlightenment through 55 teachers. Its frontispiece — possibly by a court painter — captures the journey's climax: Sudhana stands before the bodhisattva Samantabhadra as Vairocana, the Cosmic Buddha, looks on. A masterwork of Goryeo's characteristically dense and meticulous brushwork.

Korea Exhibition © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Created when Jeong Seon was in his 70s, this painting captures a peak he had known intimately—its rain-soaked rocks heavy with moisture, mist rising through the valleys below. A pioneer of ‘true view’ landscape painting, Jeong Seon rendered not just the mountain’s form but its mood, producing a work of such exceptional beauty that it has been designated a National Treasure.

Paintings of the Ten Symbols of Longevity were popular in the private quarters of Joseon royals. The sun, clouds, mountains, waterfalls, pine trees, peach trees, bamboo, lingzhi mushrooms, deer, cranes and tortoises are all found in the Chinese Daoist iconography of immortality; combining ten or more of these symbols in a single picture was a uniquely Korean innovation.