A Korean shamanic shrine room is hung with painted scrolls, and reading the wall tells you who works there. The gods that appear are not drawn from a fixed and published pantheon but from the particular relationships a practitioner has: a mountain spirit associated with a specific place, the seven stars, martial generals, a historical king treated as a spirit, the founding spirits of that line of practice, and sometimes a Buddhist figure sitting comfortably alongside the rest. Two shrines a few streets apart can therefore hold quite different sets of paintings, and a practitioner may add one when a new relationship is established.
While it hangs, the painting is treated as where the god is. Offerings are set before it, it is addressed directly, and it is cared for. When the relationship ends, whether because the practitioner stops working or because the god is no longer served, the painting is retired rather than simply taken down and stored. The paintings themselves are frontal and emphatic, with strong outlines, flat mineral colour and figures that fill the sheet, and the conventions of dress and attribute make the subject identifiable at a glance across a dim room. Most surviving examples are of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, so the corpus documents a recent stretch of a much older practice.