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네이버 공유 카카오 공유 트위터 공유 페이스북 공유

Korean White Porcelain and its Beauty Seen through <br>the Lens of Bohnchang Koo

The Philadelphia Museum of Art announces the opening of “Plain Beauty: Korean White Porcelain / Photographs Bohnchang Koo,” that features exquisite porcelains made in Korea during the Joseon dynasty (1392–1910), Joseon-inspired ceramics by contemporary artists, and large-scale photographs by Bohnchang Koo (Korean, born 1953).



The ceramics genre stands at the forefront of Korean art. Following China, Korea became the world’s second country to produce high fired stoneware. The achievement of Goryeo celadon was even admired by the Chinese who most likely disseminated the celadon technique to the Korean Peninsular. However, the development of Korean ceramics were closely related to the trends of Chinese ceramics until around the 17th century.

Simplicity of White Porcelain
With the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644, Koreans started exercising a new perspective toward China. Although there was occasional tension, Joseon regarded Ming China as the foundation of Confucianism and the leader of East Asian civilization. New Qing China, however, was ruled not by Han Chinese but the “barbarian” Manchurians. Thus the important role of China as an inspirational source slowly diminished in Korea. A growing number of people in Joseon believed that Korea was the country that had assumed legitimacy in East Asia. They thus began to explore the authenticity and uniqueness of the indigenous culture of Joseon, rather than turning their eyes to the outside. Voices were raised to express criticism of and self-reflection on the Neo-Confucianism introduced from China, which led to the emergence of Silhak, or Practical Learning, to promote the culture of Joseon and the practical utility of everyday life.

Such a trend became evident in society overall and the art circles as well. This included the development of “true-view landscape painting” for the depiction of Korea’s scenery, rather than following the idealized style of Chinese landscape painting. The ceramics sector was no exception, which began to move in an independent direction, separate from the trends of contemporary China. Koreans attempted to return to an original approach of highly valuing the aesthetics of simplicity and frugality through white porcelain.

Korea’s preference for plain white porcelain distinguished it from China and Japan. In China, potters replaced the earlier fashion for plain white wares with lavishly decorated Wucai porcelains that featured flamboyant, multicolored patterns. In Japan, vivid polychrome Imari wares gained enormous popularity. As a result, pure white wares remained a uniquely Korean phenomenon. During nearly five hundred years of production, the shape, style, and tone of such wares varied.

‘Vessels for the Heart’
Photographer Bohnchang Koo explores the classical beauty of Korean white porcelain in his Vessel series, produced between 2004 and 2008. Since the 1980s, Koo has examined the overarching themes of life and death through various subjects, including insects, animals, plants, and self-portraits. He began incorporating his Korean heritage more directly into his work with his 1998 series Masks, powerful portraits of traditional Korean mask dancers in their costumes.

As the starting point of the Vessel series, in 1989, Koo Bohnchang Koo incidentally saw a photograph of a foreign woman sitting standing beside an 18th century Joseon moon jar. (He later learned that the woman was Lucie Rie, a student of Bernard Leach, a British potter and artist with a keen interest in Korean ceramics. Acquired in Korea in 1933, the jar originally belonged to Leach and was afterward given to Rie. It is now housed at the British Museum.) Koo, who was abroad at that time, felt sudden sadness from the moon jar placed beside a foreigner, so far away from home. White porcelain again attracted his attention 15 years later, while he was traveling, this time in Tokyo. He saw images of Korean white porcelain works in a Japanese magazine with a strong urge to his own works of such wares.

Koo then visited museums in Korea and abroad and photographed only plain white porcelains, which for him echoed the essence of the Joseon aesthetic. In addition, such wares—often stained, cracked, and worn by everyday use—were a perfect subject through which he could convey warm traces of human life.

Initially, Koo felt there was a distant gap between the modern and mechanical medium of photography and the classical and natural beauty of the white porcelain. Through more than two years of work on the series, Koo eventually recognized that his focus had to be on the subtle qualities of the vessels, not their visible shape. This realization complemented the ideas of artists of the Joseon Period, who felt that conveying and appreciating the ultimate nature of the porcelain s was more important than perfecting their shape or lavishly decorating their surface. Koo’s efforts to personify the quintessence of the s resulted in photographs that are almost portraits—his images capture the different traits and personalities of each porcelain. He therefore thus subtitled the series “Vessels for the Heart.”

Drawn from the Museum’s holdings and loans from other collections in the United States and Korea, sixteen works of white porcelain, ranging from the 15th through 21st centuries, are beautifully juxtaposed with Bohnchang Koo’s monumental photographs in the exhibition, Plain Beauty: Korean White Porcelain/Photographs by Bohnchang Koo. These exceptional works on view a visual dialogue that transcends both differences in medium and the time in which they were d.

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