Page 110 - Korean Buncheong Ceramics, Samsung Museum Collection (great book)

Beyond the Original

Buncheong Idioms in Japan, 1500–1900,

and Contemporary Revivals

Soyoung Lee

Buncheong: a Storied Life

Buncheong ware emerged organically from the end of the Goryeo celadon tradition as a response
to shifts in patronage and changing political and socioeconomic conditions during the transition
to the Joseon dynasty (1392–1910). Thus was born the innovative ceramic genre emblematic of the
early Joseon (see cat. 56). The technical, stylistic, and aesthetic transformation represented by
the new ceramic was both grounded in its antecedent and radical. Prior to the establishment of the
Bunwon porcelain kilns about 1466, which were managed by the court and catered to it, a signifi-
cant portion of buncheong manufacture was dedicated to vessels for use by the court and the
central government. As these consumers turned to porcelain, buncheong ware emerged as the
localized, regional ceramics for the masses, a circumstance that undoubtedly fostered its dynamic,
unconventional, and rustic style. The overwhelming demand for and ever-expanding manufacture of
porcelain would continue to challenge and shape the course of buncheong, ultimately leading to its
extinction by the second half of the sixteenth century. In the early decades of the seventeenth
century, in the course of the reconstruction that followed the Imjin Wars, the devastating Japanese
invasions of Korea of 1592–98 (Korean: Imjin waeran), porcelain production was revived and expanded,
but not that of buncheong. Indeed, buncheong all but disappeared from the Korean peninsula
and national consciousness until the twentieth century.
In neighboring Japan, to which a portion of this Korean-manufactured ceramic was exported,
a parallel history of buncheong unfolded during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. To understand

opposite: Figure 3.1 Detail of catalogue 72