Page 116 - Korean Buncheong Ceramics, Samsung Museum Collection (great book)

Figure 3.2 Tea bowl with inscription. Korean, Joseon dynasty (1392–1910); second half of the 15th century.
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Buncheong with stamped and iron-painted design and brushed white slip, H. 2 ⁄2 in. (6.4 cm), Diam. of rim 7 ⁄8 in.
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(20 cm), Diam. of foot 2 ⁄8 in. (5.3 cm). Tokugawa Art Museum, Nagoya

side of the vessel. (See the essay “Buncheong: Unconventional Beauty,” by Jeon Seung-chang, in
this volume, for a discussion of buncheong ware produced for and inscribed with the names of
government bureaus.) Made at the kilns of Hakbong-ri in north Chungcheong Province, for use at
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the Joseon court, the dish ultimately made its way into the Owari Tokugawa family’s collection of
important tea utensils sometime during the Edo period. The physical transfer of the object altered
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its function — and hence its cultural meaning — from tributary product and tableware for state banquets
to objet d’art in an esteemed shogunal collection, employed as a tea bowl in the very particular
context of chanoyu.
Though buncheong ware was no longer inlaid and stamped by the end of the fifteenth century,
select Korean-made tea bowls in Japanese collections show that these ornamental modes were
recaptured in the second half of the sixteenth century on ceramics made for the Japanese market.
Consider the famed tea bowl known as Mishima-oke (fig. 3.3), which comes with a letter written by
the tea master Hosokawa Sansai (1563–1645). Sansai notes that this tea bowl was once owned by
Sen no Doan (1546–1607), the son and disciple of Rikyu; the lineage of ownership traces back to Rikyu
himself and includes Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542–1616), founder of the Tokugawa shogunate, which
ruled through the Edo period, from whom it passed to Tokugawa Yoshinao (1601–1650) of the Owari
branch of the shogunal family. Sansai also declares this bowl to be a “peerless masterpiece.” This
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document confirms the use of the term mishima within Japanese tea circles of the early Edo period

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