Page 137 - Korean Buncheong Ceramics, Samsung Museum Collection (great book)

enduring appeaL: echoeS of Buncheong t oday

Japan’s occupation of Korea for much of the first half of the twentieth century (1910–45) inevitably
resulted in a complex entangling of the two cultures that continues today. Setting aside the vast
political and economic ramifications of the colonial period, within the cultural realm the Japanese
involvement with the Korean artistic heritage — appreciation and appropriation, destruction and
preservation — profoundly affected its reception during that time and throughout the modern
period, not only in Korea and Japan but in the West as well. In the case of buncheong, the colonialist
excavations of old kiln sites, like those of Hakbong-ri in Chungcheong Province, contributed to
the twentieth-century historiography of this early Joseon ceramic (see Jeon Seung-chang’s essay,
“Buncheong: Unconventional Beauty,” in this volume). Parallel with the archaeological investiga-
tions on the peninsula, there developed within Japan a discourse of the rediscovery of the forgotten,
or at least neglected, beauty and artistic value of Korean “folk art,” championed by the legendary
cultural critic Yanagi Soetsu (1889–1961). In addition, the reprisal of Joseon-period Korean ceramic
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idioms, particularly buncheong, by descendants of late sixteenth-century Korean potters, such
as the Nakazato family of Karatsu ware and the Miwa family of Hagi ware, picked up momentum
after the mid-twentieth century. As in the Edo period, modern and contemporary Japanese reinter-
pretations of the buncheong tradition were based on two models — early Joseon buncheong ware
and the later Korean-made export ceramics.
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Among the more unexpected twentieth-century Japanese proponents of the buncheong idioms
was the potter Kondo Yutaka (1932–1983), who had no connection to the Japanese ceramic traditions
with ties to Korean immigrant potters. Descended from a samurai family, Yutaka was the eldest
son of Kondo Yuzo, who was designated a National Living Treasure for his work in porcelain with
cobalt-blue-painted designs. Yutaka discovered Korean ceramics, especially slip-inlaid buncheong
ware, by chance; he first saw early Joseon buncheong ceramics in Western collections during his
travels in Europe and the United States and, later, in Korea. He developed a highly creative and
personal vocabulary of white-slip design — as exemplified by a stunning black and white vase (cat. 67),
whose white-stamped pattern both echoes and is utterly distinct from ancient buncheong ware. One
of the giants of contemporary Japanese pottery, whose wide-ranging repertoire includes revivals of
Joseon-period Korean ceramics, Tsujimura Shiro (b. 1947) has established himself as an artist
whose deep command of buncheong-inspired white-slip application produces works that are both
reverent and original. His pieces display his particular fondness for dipping the entire (or nearly the
entire) vessel in white slip (the technique known in Japanese as kohiki ), in ways that highlight
the sensuous and artistic possibilities of that medium (see cats. 68, 69).

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