Written by: Sian Stickings  |  Posted on: May 8th, 2025

In April, BKS members had a special opportunity to visit the Oriental Museum at the University of Durham for a fascinating tour of the current exhibition, ‘Knitted Together: The Korean Lives of Richard and Joan Rutt’ with the Curator of the Korean Collections, BKS Committee member Lauren Barnes; then to take a behind-the-scenes look at objects from the Oriental Museum’s Korean collection; and, finally, to hear an excellent talk from Professor Simon Mills on Korean Jogye Buddhist chant.

The Oriental Museum, University of Durham

It was a busy day, and one full of new discoveries!

The Right Reverend Richard Rutt first travelled to Korea as an Anglican missionary in 1954, and he remained there for almost 20 years in all, joined later by his wife Joan, and becoming Assistant Bishop and then Bishop of the Diocese of Daejeon, an area which then covered several provinces of South Korea. During his time in Korea, Rutt not only developed a deep interest in Korean culture and literature, publishing widely on those subjects, but also took and kept hundreds of photographs of people he met, of their daily activities, and of places he visited and knew well.  These are now part of the Oriental Museum’s collection, and a selection are on show as part of the current exhibition.  They form an extraordinary archive of Korea during a time of rapid change:  for those of us whose Seoul experiences came decades later, the photos of street scenes there with people wearing hanbok walking between cars and carts on a main street are astonishing.   The subjects he chose to photograph reflected his personal interests:  they include cats and cows, as well as festivals, dances, ceremonies, farming and daily life.

Objects from the lives of Richard and Joan Rutt are also on display.  We all marvelled at the hand-knitted mitre which he made for himself after his return to the UK, when he was Bishop of Leicester;  he was an accomplished knitter, and a leading authority on the history of knitting.  A man of very many talents!  There is also an installation in the permanent Korea Gallery which pays tribute to the impact of the Rutts’ collection on the Museum, setting pieces which they donated alongside other and more recent related acquisitions.

a behind-the-scenes look

The second part of our visit was a look behind the scenes, where screens, ceramics, metal and other objects not usually on display were laid out for us to examine, and we also had the chance to see more photos from the Rutt collection.  It was very interesting to hear from Lauren about how new pieces are selected and acquired for the collection.

Finally, we heard from Professor Simon Mills about his fieldwork investigating the varied chant styles of the Jogye Order Buddhist monks in South Korea, in a talk entitled ‘Personal Patterns of Enlightenment’.  He explained that his purpose in this project was to document living Korean Buddhist culture.  Relatively little research has been carried out into how the monks develop the ‘tunes’ and performance styles of the chants they perform at the three regular daily services, though the recordings he played for us demonstrated that those ‘tunes’ and styles vary greatly.  Professor Mills visited more than forty temples across South Korea, documenting the services and interviewing the monks who chanted.   During their years of training in the gangweon, they learn to chant in a rather uniform style, through imitation;  but after their training is completed, there is a strong emphasis on developing their own way.  For anyone who has heard the chanting in a Korean Buddhist temple, and perhaps wondered about its significance and how it relates to music performed in the ceremonies of other religions, this was an illuminating and thought-provoking talk.

Cats, ceramics, knitting and chanting:  it was a very special day! A big thank you to Lauren, especially, and to everyone involved in making it happen.

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