Kyūden zushi (palace-style shrine), unknown maker from Japan

Thayer expressed great interest in Japanese religions in her collecting habits, establishing a “praying room” in her home where she exhibited model shrines with Buddhist sculpture, as well as ritual textiles. Thayer’s decision to purchase this zushi may also reflect a growing admiration among Americans for Japanese architecture, especially following the international exhibitions in Philadelphia (1876) and Chicago (1893), at which the Japanese government had arranged large on-site constructions. This gilded, black lacquer shrine emulates the face or entrance gates to larger shrines, and may initially have served a ritual function. Additionally, since at least the 17th century, some European visitors to Japan began to associate lacquer, particularly black lacquer, with social elites. This shrine may have been sold on the foreign market to meet the growing demand among European and American collectors for Japanese lacquers.

Thayer expressed great interest in Japanese religions in her collecting habits, establishing a “praying room” in her home where she exhibited model shrines with Buddhist sculpture, as well as ritual textiles. Thayer’s decision to purchase this zushi may also reflect a growing admiration among Americans for Japanese architecture, especially following the international exhibitions in
Philadelphia (1876) and Chicago (1893), at which the Japanese government had arranged large on-site constructions. This gilded, black lacquer shrine emulates the face or entrance gates to larger shrines, and may initially have served a ritual function. Additionally, since at least the 17th century, some European visitors to Japan began to associate lacquer, particularly black lacquer, with social
elites. This shrine may have been sold on the foreign market to meet the growing demand among European and American collectors for Japanese lacquers.

In 1908, a year after her husband passed away, Sallie Casey Thayer traveled to Chicago where she studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and began to collect works of art with serious intent. Although she initially bought only Japanese woodblock prints, she quickly expanded her collecting focus to include other sorts of objects from China, Japan, and Korea. Thayer purchased many of them at H. Deakin and Son and the New Gallery. It is possible that she also bought this Kyūden zushi, or palace-style shrine, in Chicago.

This architectural structure is a Japanese Buddhist portable shrine, referred to as a zushi in Japanese, which was made to house a sacred image. The upper part is in the shape of a building with a roof, brackets, and pillars, which is supported by a high dais, or platform. The roof has dormer gables and curved gables that are commonly seen in traditional Japanese architecture, including castles, Buddhist temples, and Shinto shrines. This particular form of zushi is called a kyūden, which means palace. The elevated dais that is composed of several layered rectangular blocks, narrowing in the middle, is meant to represent the sacred Mt. Sumeru, the highest mountain located at the center of the world in Buddhist cosmology. Moreover, the whole structure is decorated with auspicious motifs, such as phoenixes, dragons, lions, and bamboo flutes, which are often used to symbolize the paradise of Amida Buddha.
Currently the shrine is empty inside. However, in the 1920s when displayed in Spooner Hall (previously the Spooner-Thayer Museum of Art) on the University of Kansas campus, the shrine had additional rooftop ornaments and railings around the dais. The pillars were also covered with curtains. This shrine might have been made for an inner sanctuary of a temple hall. Although such a shrine itself demarks a sacred space to enshrine the figure of a deity or honored monk, when in the most sanctified space of a temple, its sacredness is amplified.
Text by YeGee Kwon