Image: The Fourth King of Hell, late 1300s. Korea, Goryeo dynasty (918–1392). Hanging scroll; ink, color, and gold ink on silk. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund and museum purchase from various donors by exchange and Partial Gift of The Honorable Joseph P. Carroll and Roberta Carroll, M.D.
The Cleveland Museum of Art opens "Ten Kings of Hell: The Afterlife in Medieval Korea" on October 11, 2026, in its Special Exhibition Hall, where it remains on view through January 3, 2027. The museum organized the exhibition in partnership with the National Museum of Korea, and it draws more than one hundred works from public and private collections in Korea, Japan, the United States and the United Kingdom.
The subject is the Goryeo dynasty, which ruled Korea from 918 to 1392, and the way its artists pictured what happens after death. According to the museum, the show asks how people of the period imagined the world beyond death, and how objects and materials helped give that imagined world its form.
The core of the exhibition is a set of ten hanging scrolls painted in the 1300s, each depicting one of the Ten Kings of Hell. The set was dispersed, and this is the first time the scrolls have been shown together since the 1960s. Seen in sequence, they move through judgment, atonement and salvation.
The galleries are arranged in three connected sections that follow the soul from death, through purgatory, to the Buddhist paradise. The museum's own recent acquisitions appear along the way: "The Fourth King of Hell" from the late 1300s, a "Kṣitigarbha Bodhisattva" from the 1300s, and a "Knife Sheath" from the 1100s, which received Apollo magazine's Acquisition of the Year Award in 2022. Other Goryeo objects listed by the museum include "The Fifth King of Hell," a bronze lotus-shaped incense burner dated 1077, a celadon cup with a molded lotus-petal design, a unicorn-shaped incense burner, a stone coffin carved with the Four Guardian Deities and a small Buddhist portable shrine.
The exhibition also places the art in its historical setting. The museum links the period's concern with purgatory to political turmoil and environmental strain, including the climate swings of the Little Ice Age and the spread of the Black Death.
Contemporary works extend the theme into the present. Anicka Yi's "Bending Willow Branches" (2025) opens the show, and Park Chan-kyong's immersive "Belated Bosal" (2019) addresses environmental disaster and its consequences. Gala Porras-Kim, a 2025 MacArthur Fellow, made "The Third King of Hell Afterimage" (2025) for the exhibition, examining what happens to objects once they enter Western collections. Works by Do Ho Suh, Noh Sang Kyoon and the Venerable Song Cheon are also featured.
Digital displays include a 3-D view of a sutra container and a large "Zoom Wall" for examining painting details, alongside audio and video installations such as the sound of a Buddhist temple bell. A catalogue by Sooa Im McCormick and Yukio Lippit, with contributions by In Hee Song, accompanies the exhibition.
