Altar High Chair (Kyo-Yi) (1800s): Art, History and Details

Altar High Chair (Kyo-Yi) (1800s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Many homes in premodern Korean society had a memorial shrine for preparing and holding ancestral rites. Placed on the top of a tall chair, this miniature edifice (called the spirit house) served as a temporary residence for visiting ancestral spirits. On the table, a variety of delicacies such as fruits, rice, meat, and wine would be placed to treat those spiritual guests.

Object facts

• Title: Altar High Chair (Kyo-Yi)
• Date: 1800s
• Culture: Korea, Joseon dynasty (1392–1910)
• Type: Furniture and woodwork
• Technique: pine nut wood
• Dimensions: Overall: 128.4 x 52 cm (50 9/16 x 20 1/2 in.)
• Collection: Korean Art
• Department: Korean Art
• Accession number: 1999.120.3

A detail from the museum

The belief in two types of souls, the spiritual and the corporeal, embodied the core concept of ancestral worship in traditional China and Korea. While the corporeal soul is believed to reside in the tomb, the spiritual soul, in the spirit house, guards his or her descendants.

Collection credit

Gift of The Honorable Joseph P. Carroll and Roberta Carroll, M.D. in memory of Robert P. Bergman

Further reading listed by the museum

• Treasures from Korea: Arts and Culture of the Joseon Dynasty, 1392-1910. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2014.
• Deuchler, Martina. “Mourning and Funerary Rites.” In The Confucian Transformation of Korea (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press), 1992.
• Ch'a, Mi-rae, Kwi-suk An, Cleveland Museum of Art, and 국외소재문화재재단. The Korean Collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Edited by An Min-hŭi. First edition, English ed. Overseas Korean Cultural Heritage Series, 16. Seoul, Republic of Korea: Overseas Korean Cultural Heritage Foundation, 2021.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.