The Moon Jar (Dalhangari) has been a favorite subject matter among Korean artists for the last 20 years. Affection for it range of emotional and cultural signifiers is impressive: from Kim Whanki, an abstract painter who is widely regarded as a representative figure for modernist art in South Korea, to Ko Young-hoon, a prominent figure in the Korean hyperrealism, to the photographer Koo Bohnchang and the ceramic artist Kwon Dae-sup. For each of these Korean artists the Moon Jar remains a revered object and a motif congruent with the nation’s past and present. By interlinking the boundary of affection shared by many contemporary Korean artists working today with their ancestors and countrymen of the Joeson dynasty, specifically the elite literati, this precious object represents and induces in the Korean public a kind of aesthetics and emotional longevity that never diminishes over time. Of many modern Korean artists who were attracted to the voluptuous, bulbous beauty of the Moon Jar, Kim Whanki used it as a motif for his paintings, capturing the politics of collective Korean national identity until it was lost in the period of Japanese colonialism. The admiration that Kim Whanki maintained for the Moon Jar was recorded in detail in his paintings, as well as his essays and correspondences. He once wrote, “These ceramic jars are just ordinary, round-bodied jars. Their color is also remarkably simple, ordinary white. The mundane color and form of this mundane vessel, some with cracked surface or torn mouth, fascinate viewers irresistibly. I can assure you I am not the only one, because you will surely be captivated by it as soon as you have a chance to see one.” (Kim Whanki, 2021).

The tendency of expressing admiration for the Moon Jar in the early 21st century did not end with Kim Whanki’s art and his profound fondness for this utilitarian object. It was adapted to a new dimension by expressing material properties that were and continue to be constructed independently through the treatment of matière. Choi Young-wook, graduating with a bachelor’s degree and master’s in art, and is one of the artists representing this medium alteration as new tendency. One may wonder how different is the Moon Jar that he expressed from that of Kim Whanki? What made the jar so special to him? Why did he include the term “karma” in the titles of most of his paintings of the Moon Jar? Indeed, what he captured looks like a Moon Jar but on closer inspection, if we look more carefully, it reveals the traces of piled up ceramic layers and a set of entangled lines that are typical to the treatment of matière. Initially, it is hard to deduce these subtle changes if compared to the works of other artists, yet what remains central here is the expression itself.

Choi Young-wook once said that he was greatly impressed and inspired from the work of a white porcelain Moon Jar that he saw at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City (The Met). The reason he saw the Moon Jar at the Met rather than the National Museum of Korea in Seoul, which has a larger collection of Moon Jars, can be attributed to the specific identity associated with the jar despite its reproducibility and sometimes, ceremonial status. There are similarities between the experiences both artists had. The fact that Kim Whanki was reminded of the Moon Jar at home when he looked at the moon in the New York night sky and yearned for the jar he had left behind at his home in Korea. Such subjectivity reveals that the Moon Jar to the artist was not a simple work of art, but rather one that yielded personal memories bound up with a nation structured through heritage and objects themselves in order to create culture. Similarly, the Moon Jar that Choi Young-wook viewed in New York should have been an object created by memories and experiences that he would not have been the same had we encounter it when he was staying in Korea. That explains why the artist once said that he wanted to depict the Moon Jar as a medium for the communication of memory. The white porcelain Moon Jar of the Joseon dynasty that he happened to see in New York was displayed there as a work of art and was aesthetically, materially and culturally different from other diverse works originating from China, Japan, Middle and Southeast Asia, which were also displayed at the Korean Pavilion in the Met.

Opened in the late 1990s, the Korean gallery at the Met is not large enough to contain an extensive Korean art collection due to space constraints, and accordingly, this institution is largely limited to the permanent exhibition of pottery and other craftworks rather than paintings and other large-scale mediums. Given that the artist was attracted to the Moon Jar among all the various other art objects at the Met, it seems he was fascinated by the unique receptivity of the object, the capacity that can embrace all the different interpretations made to the Moon Jar. More typically, that such an object would induce in a person a sense of pride to see a piece of cultural antiquity on display in a world-class museum. That is probably why Choi Young-wook’s interest was not limited to the Korean cultural traits, aesthetic expression and symbolic meaning of the Moon Jar but instead, he processed the work one step further to a more subjective interpretation, relating it with Walter Benjamin’s notion of “allegory”. In other words, and to take a cue from Bainard Cowan, allegory to Benjamin was “pre-eminently a kind of experience” (1981, p. 110), a conviction about the world and the objects in it.

It is probably the work of Kim Whanki where the symbolism of the Moon Jar is expressed most clearly. This particular symbolism seems to have been formed on the basis of Korea’s unique cultural and art histories as there is no similar porcelain works seen in either China or Japan. As for Choi Young-wook, whose artistic career began almost 50 years after Kim Whanki’s, the jar functions as an allegory with which its multiple properties can be interpreted in the artist’s or viewer’s own vocabulary, resulting in the creation of multilayered interpretations. Allegory, unlike symbolism, where the cultural and artistic meanings are fixed, uses the property of fluidity, variability and slipperiness as its main operational mechanism. Therefore, it is closely related with the techniques used by Choi Young-wook in his paintings.

The early phase of Choi Young-wook’s art is marked by the narrative paintings represented by A Story of One Day. His paintings in this period were largely representational, painted using “the colors of five directions” (Obangsaek), and related to the memories of his childhood days. The representational narrative disappeared completely when he was attracted to the Moon Jar in 2005. From this discovery and new object of study, he began resisting the realistic depiction of the Moon Jar, a work of art which had to exist only as a dead object and kept in a museum. It is true that Choi Young-wook painted real objects, but even then, some of these jars that he depicted tended to contain a net of numerous cracks on the surface that one cannot find on real jars. When he paints a Moon Jar, he applies gesso and white powder, and after these are dried, rubs the surface with a sandpaper. He continues the same process until he gets the matte effect he wants to achieve. One may think that his artworks of the Moon Jar are paintings completed simply by “painting” it as an art object. This would be presumptuous and incorrect because for Choi Young-wook, the process of painting a Moon Jar is to reveal the strata of time through the process of accumulating time vis-à-vis the action of piling up, drying and trimming materials chosen for his artwork inspired by the Moon Jar. Korean white porcelain jars are unique in that their makers tend not to use the potter’s wheel, resulting in the creation of remarkably unsymmetrical, atypical vessels. The mediocre form of the vessel seemingly made inattentively, a kind of deliberate “de-skilling” (Roberts, 2010), yet work that holds a beauty inside that can be created only by nature. It is often said that the beauty of a ceramic vessel is decided by the temperature of the fire that the artist cannot control. As for the Moon Jar, the effect of contingency often creates a net of fine cracks on the surface during the firing process, which Choi Young-wook interprets in his own language. The cracks can also appear after the completion of the firing process according to the passage of time. For Choi Young-wook, these fine cracks created on the surface of the Moon Jar are the “lines intertwined and entangled”, extending to, “destiny”, “karma” and “pratyaya”. He once stated, “The long and tedious hours are those during which I ponder over my pratyaya.” The fine lines are regarded as roads that the artist has trodden on, traces of his memories, and the chronicle of Mnemosyne (the goddess of memory in Greek mythology). The roads, put on an atlas like Moon Jar can be interpreted as an abstracted travelogue—one where throughout our lives we never adhere to a simple or straight life path. Instead, we take complex paths and sojourns that seen from a distance, or through introspection, that these very lines intricately intertwine us, forming not only numerous atypical forms but can be seen as a mapping of redeemable memory in our encounters with the world.

That is why Choi Young-wook’s Moon Jar needs to be reinterpreted from a new perspective based not only on its form, but also on the flows and traces of the numerous fine lines, the constellations created on its surface, and accumulated on its matière. Imagination is the atlas of our life: it conveys all types of memory from personal, to local, national, regional, even global. Only then, we can find Choi Young-wook’s unique identity and personality as an artist and the sedimentary strata that exist as a vestige of memories and time. An interpretation such as this can explain why he continued to use the term “karma” in the title of his works. As a Buddhist term, karma refers to the totality of a person’s action, or times connected with each other based on the spiritual principle of cause and effect. All the phenomena unfolded before our eyes presently are connected with karma of the past and those resulting from our actions now with the karma of the future, and accordingly, temporality expressed on the surface of his Moon Jar represents the mixture and overlapping of many layers of temporality.

The moniker “large white porcelain jar” (Baekja Daeho) was widely used to refer to the large, round-bodied white porcelain jar dating as far back as the Joseon period until as recently as 2005. As it is said, it was through the language shared by the two artists, Choe Sunu and Kim Whanki, who shared the same keen interest in Korean-specific aesthetic and linguistic traditions, that the moniker “Moon Jar” (Dalhangari) therefore began to replace the former one used and would then circulate widely. Nightfall beings the Moon. It has long been a nocturnal symbol, allowing for different lunar phases that have been understood among Korean people living in the agricultural society, a cultural sign of symbolizing fertility. Despite its moniker, white porcelain moon jar, the vessel does not have the surface that is made of purely white material and its large voluminous body not exactly circular but bulbous and uneven. Even through its imperfections as ceramic object, it was enough to guide Korean people to find a remarkably simple beauty from it. To Choi Young-wook, the Moon Jar was a mirror refracting the life of ordinary Korean people and a vessel which stored—like its design was intended for—its own life story and those who derived meaning from its metaphorical potential to hold onto something, to contain something. In addition, Choi intended use for the jar is that it transforms or is a medium that stores the stories of other people as well.

Choi Young-wook once wrote, “I chose the image of the Moon Jar as a medium for communication. Have you have ever met [and spoke your truth or deepest desire to] the jar secretly? It would not reveal much but embraces a lot. I found it had an excessively simple look, but upon a closer look [at this vessel], I realized that this creature had an extremely refined appearance. It eventually penetrated me and became one with me. It teaches me about how I should live and what life is a right one. Others regard me as a painter of the Moon Jar. But the truth is that what I am doing is not painting the Moon Jar but telling my stories, or my wish to live like [and among] the Moon Jar.” If “the round jar, white and round jar filling my arms” is “standing at the vanguard of art” representing the achievement of Kim Whanki, Choi Young-wook’s jar, these intriguing, vernacular vessels become things that reflect life in which the tedious, repetitive times that continue to draw lines, and the traces of daily life that create tactile surfaces formed from sediment of memories become something less ordinary and are elevated, culturally to the extraordinary. For me, the works by Choi Young-wook and his surface representations appear optically to be both two- and three-dimensional renderings, but as I articulated earlier, these vessels connote an allegorical gesture that gets at emotive, everyday realities. Such work allows many different interpretations, particularly the multilayered, intricately interwoven net of fine lines that speak to visual properties and metaphors to a larger atlas of our mobile lives at home and the universe beyond it. This twofold reading reminds the viewers of Choi’s Moon Jar and how even the simplest object can be imbued with a manifold set of ideas, memories and experiences.