An 18th-century painting of hell has come home. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has returned "The Tenth King of Hell" to Sinheungsa Temple in South Korea, where it hung for centuries before being taken in 1954, just after the Korean War ended.
The painting, completed in 1798 during the Joseon Dynasty, was one panel of a 10-part series called "Siwangdo" that depicted the ten kings of hell in vivid detail. A Japanese government survey from 1942 documented it at the temple, and U.S. military photographs from 1953–1954 show it was still there when American forces occupied the region. Then it vanished.
For decades, no one knew where it had gone. The Met acquired it in 2007 from a private collector, unaware of its contested history. The museum's own research eventually traced the painting's path: illicitly removed during the chaotic aftermath of war, passed through private hands, and eventually catalogued in a major American institution.
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Start Your News DetoxWhat makes this return significant isn't just the painting itself. It's part of a larger reckoning. In 2020, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art returned six panels of the same "Siwangdo" series to South Korea, working with the Jogye Order of Korean Buddhism. That effort opened conversations. It showed that repatriation was possible, that institutions could acknowledge difficult histories and act on them.
The Met's decision signals a shift in how major museums approach contested collections. In 2023, the institution launched the Cultural Property Initiative, assigning researchers to review objects with unclear or problematic origins. It's not a perfect system—three panels of the "Siwangdo" series remain abroad—but it represents an institutional commitment to looking inward.
"Our cultural heritage holds its greatest meaning when it is in its rightful place," said Lee Sang-rae, chairman of the Sokcho Committee for the Return of Cultural Heritage, which coordinated the effort. That's not sentiment. It's practical. A painting designed for a specific temple, in a specific tradition, separated from its community loses something essential.
The return happened quietly, announced on the Met's website rather than through press releases. No fanfare. Just a painting going back where it belongs, and an institution acknowledging that sometimes the right thing to do is also the hard thing to do.
