Over the past seven years, the Korean painter Choi Young Wook (1964-) has consistently adopted the moon jar – a porcelain vessel in vogue among the general Korean public during the late Joseon dynasty (1392-1910) – as the principal subject of his paintings, gradually gaining international attention. According to Choi’s own recollections, some time ago when he was still groping to find his own style and mode of expression, he chanced upon a Joseon-era moon jar in a museum while traveling in Europe and the United States. The sight aroused in him a sense of deja vu, as if he were experiencing something intimate yet unfamiliar. This serendipitous encounter spurred him to start painting white porcelain moon jars, and also to research and collect them.

In reality, long before moon jars began appearing in Choi Young Wook’s paintings, white porcelain was an important traditional artistic asset passed down from the Joseon dynasty, influencing and inspiring several well-known modern and contemporary Korean artists. Modernist pioneer Kim Whan-ki (1913-1974), who excels at abstract art, is one of the more prominent examples. Veteran contemporary ceramicist Park Young-sook (1949-) directly carries on the tradition of Joseon white porcelain, having revived the style of moon jars and their firing techniques, which at one time had been lost. In recent years and particularly since 2006, well-known photographer Koo Bohn-chang (1953-) has also made white porcelain, especially moon jars, a major subject of his photos, exploring them as a possible form of contemporary artistic expression.

The rise of Joseon white porcelain was actually influenced by Ming-dynasty China. By the middle of the 15th century, it had developed its own distinctive ethnic spirit and aesthetic, and had even become the exclusive purview of the royal court.

According to scholarly texts, in the early 15th century, when the Joseon Dynasty was first being established as a Confucian kingdom, King Sejong (1397-1450) commanded that white porcelain replace the luxurious and exorbitant gold and silver implements the court had originally been accustomed to using. Thereafter, the king founded a royal kiln, dedicated to producing utensils for the “internal use” of the royal household, and commencing the “golden age of white porcelain.”１ From the late 15th century to the early 17th century, the Joseon royal court banned the use of white porcelain by all except royalty, and dignitaries from the Ming court. In 1616 the crown partially lifted the ban, permitting the gentry to use sang baekja (“common” white porcelain), a form of white porcelain rougher in quality than that used by royalty.

２ Current scholarship indicates that due to the strict class divisions of traditional Korean society, commoners were never officially allowed to use white porcelain even at the end of the Joseon dynasty, and when they did, they did so privately and illicitly. Yet the very existence of this injunction reflects how broadly the beauty of white porcelain was coveted throughout Joseon society, regardless of a person’s social position. The scholar Cheng Chi-jen, a specialist in Joseon white porcelain, states concretely: “White porcelain was a product that reflected the aesthetic of Confucian political thought: the pursuit of cleanliness and purity, an emphasis on morality and a love of nature.”３Most of the white moon jars still extant from the Joseon dynasty may be dated to sometime in the 17th or 18th centuries and are likely to be of the “common” sang baekja variety, not the more refined ware exclusive to royalty. They thus reflect the tastes and ideals of the gentry, or even the hoi polloi. The mingei (“folk crafts”) movement of early twentieth-century Japan, which was influenced and inspired by Britain’s folk crafts movement, particularly appreciated white Joseon porcelain for its “lack of self-consciousness” and “the beauty of its slight imperfection.”４ These are expressed in the materials used to produce the moon jars – through defects in the clay and glaze – as well as their forms: Because the vessels are made by joining upper and lower sections, the center bulge of the jar where the two halves meet protrudes slightly, resulting in a shape that is never perfectly spherical, concretely manifesting the figurative truth that reality falls short of our ideals. Indeed, this state of imperfection or geometrical incompleteness reflects the most realistic and natural conditions of human life, just as the acclaimed Song-dynasty poet Su Dongpo famously wrote: How long will the full moon last?... Men have sorrow and joy; they part and meet again. The moon brightens and dims, waxes and wanes. Nothing has been perfect since the days of old.

The first Western arts specialist to notice and collect Joseon white porcelain was the British ceramicist Bernard Leach (1887-1979). At the time he was personally involved in Japan’s mingei movement. In 1935 he set off from Japan to visit Korea and purchased a moon jar in an antique shop in Seoul. Later, he brought it back to England, and his own work was influenced by its manufacture. For a period of more than 60 years, this work was passed from collector to collector, finally joining the permanent collection of the British Museum in 1999.５ Perhaps Leach’s attention and promotion encouraged some Western museums that collected East Asian art to take interest in moon jars. According to the British Museum’s exhibit information, only around 20 Joseon moon jars remain in the entire world. ６ In addition to the one currently at the British Museum, both the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago hold one in their collections. Somewhat ironically but quite clearly, it was especially serendipitous that just when Choi Young Wook was struggling to find his personal artistic style, he chanced upon a moon jar at MOMA, far from the shores of Korea, and because of this encounter determined his creative path, setting off on the road to artistic maturity.

According to general understanding, white porcelain moon jars were originally used to store white rice, soy sauce or wine, and sometimes they served as flower vases.７As historical objects that embodied the Confucian ethics and aesthetics of the Joseon dynasty, Choi Young Wook saw in them the unpretentious beauty of the life of ordinary folk. In his artist’s statement “Images of Memories,” he described them thusly: “The moon-jar’s shape and color tones are unaffected and simple, and it is akin to ‘cheuk-eun-ji-shim (惻隱之心),’ a traditional reference meaning the natural sympathy or compassion that comes from the bottom of one’s heart.”８ One can see that in the moon jar, Choi Young Wook discovered an aesthetic of human relations that could be extended to the moral values of Confucianism.

In the real world, white porcelain changes over time: Weathered by history and life, caressed by human hands, bathed by water and rubbed by cloth for long years, its surface transforms and even becomes scuffed. The “whiteness” of its exterior takes on a completely different quality from its original whiteness when fresh from the kiln.

Permeated with the scars of life, the crackled glaze on the exterior of the moon jar often increases in the complexity of its fractured patterns, yielding an intermingling of the new with the old. Choi extends the moon jar’s many minute changes wrought by time to signify the universal life memories that humanity collectively shares. The crackled patterns of the glaze thus become a symbol of the mutual connections of fate, which he encompasses under the term “karma.” Choi himself writes: The Work ‘Karma’ has a focal meaning in the drawing of lines. The lines are not realistic representations of hairline cracks on the surface of porcelains.

They are the paths upon our life journey. Those lines I depict continue yet split, they meet again at some point, and separate: we are alike yet arguably different, and we can be unified into one despite these differences.９ Thus, through the brush of Choi Young Wook, the moon jar and its dense, intricate crackled patterns are transformed with rich sensuality into a vehicle for metaphorical images of life or the twists of fate. While Joseon moon jars, the only visual image in his paintings, give the viewer the impression of photorealistic reproduction, Choi is actually intent upon transcending mere imitation. Starting from the foundation of his training in Western oil painting, he has incorporated materials and styles from traditional East Asian painting, to express in minute detail the special qualities of a moon jar’s glaze and crackled fissures. To render the form of the moon jar on the canvas, he applies a specially mixed resin in multiple layers, quite reminiscent of the techniques and concepts of traditional Chinese lacquering, achieving a realistic, semi-transparent, glossy effect.

Simultaneously, within this glaze that is smooth yet possesses thickness, he allows the viewer to gaze and muse upon the lines of fate, either distinct or implicit, that he has painstakingly woven with meticulous brushstrokes. But he does not stop there: In many of the works completed with these techniques, images of landscapes shrouded in clouds or dense smoke can also often be glimpsed, vaguely yet undeniably, on the glazed faces of the vessel, stirring thoughts of ancient times.

Choi’s repeated application of a specially prepared glaze to his paintings evokes associations with the well-known contemporary American artists Jasper Johns (1930-) and Brice Marden (1938-), who applied wax to some of their early paintings. According to the records of the ancient Romans, encaustic painting, which employed beeswax as a medium, got its start in ancient Greece and enjoyed popularity throughout the Hellenistic and Roman eras. The best known ancient encaustic paintings remaining today are mummy portraits painted on wooden slats. Johns is known as an innovative contemporary revivalist of encaustic painting, which Marden continued and developed, and afterward it became a common technique of contemporary art. The younger Spanish contemporary artist Jose Maria Cano (1959-), for example, is one master of encaustic techniques. In encausting painting, wax and pigment are melted together into a single liquid that, when applied, gives the picture the quality of being coated in a layer, as if it is a sealed-up, objectified specimen.

Even if they do not use wax, many artists apply synthetic resin, spraying it on canvases or the surfaces of printed images, achieving a readily visible thickness or sense of protrusion. The application of this technique creates a visual sense of distance. The painting or painted object itself seems to be crystallized or frozen, invoking in the viewer a psychological sense of suffocation, asphyxiation, or even death.

While many Western contemporary artists have employed the material physicality of wax or synthetic resins to highlight the crisis of the materialization of values brought about by Western industrial capitalism, Choi Young Wook’s intention is to call for a return to humanistic values and respect for nature, history and tradition. Put concretely, while Choi uses resin similarly, building up multiple layers to attain a certain thickness and simulate the texture of the transparent glazed surface of white porcelain, both the visual and psychological effects are clearly different. Whether or not he is aware of it himself, the white porcelain glazed surfaces that appear in his paintings manifest a warm sense of breathability and emit their own aureolas, just like the moon for which they are named. What is essential to notice are the comparative sizes of actual moon jars and Choi’s painted images – while the diameters at the center bulges of most extant jars generally range between 30 and 40 centimeters, the vast majority of Choi’s paintings are much larger in scale. Perhaps because of this theatrical act of magnification, the viewer may readily infer that in his forms and strategies Choi has appropriated the legacy of the American photorealism movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. This, however, is merely a superficial coincidence;; Choi’s artistic spirit and aesthetic pursuits are in fact completely different.

American photorealism relied principally on photographs, enlarging the images as paintings, and thus underscoring the camera lens’s special mechanistic – even distortive – effect. At the same time, because these paintings greatly magnified the details in photos, retaining even the tiniest feature, this produced an effect of homogenization and flattening that made the works feel cold and distant. In this way the artists dramatically conveyed or reflected the alienation and aloofness common in modern capitalist society. But Choi’s desires are obviously different, his objectives completely opposite. When reproducing the form of the moon jar, he has perhaps benefited from the aid of photography; nonetheless, his intention is not to produce cold severity, nor to convey the alienation and distance of modernity. When it comes to the imitation of the moon jar’s external form, his works at first blush genuinely do have the visual effect of photorealism, yet when the viewer begins to pay attention to the minute cracks depicted in fine brushwork, it is not hard to discover that these are completely his own original abstract expression. In the context of subjective grasp and the complex convergence of conscious, subconscious and unconscious, the cracked lines of the moon jar provide more than a verisimilitude of the artist’s “perception of the object”; in reality, they are personal images of his own creating. What he pursues is the spirit of nature informed by his individual mental landscape. What he pursues is the profundity of life. What he hopes to do is seek a place where he may humbly stand on his own within an eternal time and space, and also to build a relationship with others and the world. Following a similar line of thought, the Korean artist Yoon Jin-sup finds in Choi Young Wook’s painting a form of discipline identical to the aesthetic perspective of the well-known dansaekhwa (“monochrome painting”) movement of the 1970s and 1980s.１０ Certainly, Choi Young Wook’s ultimate objective is not to depict any specific, material jar of white porcelain in the real world, or to engage in the reproduction of images, even though his technique renders his subject matter strikingly lifelike. He may select a specific vessel as a subject for replication, in order to grasp the form of the jar and the semi-transparent layered effect of the glaze, or its crackled fissures. Yet as he has honed his technique over the course of seven years, becoming ever more refined, and in particular as he has integrated East Asian tradition with the expressive methods of Western modern painting, the Joseon moon jar has evolved under the brush of Choi Young Wook beyond a reflection or recreation of a single “particular” and has been sublimated as a study or creation of the universal.

Choi Young Wook confidently defines his works as images of his memories and the story of his own life. １１ Because of the serendipitous encounter caused by “karma,” white porcelain moon jars have become the subject of his deep musing, and the vehicle through which he paints the “images of his recollections.” By borrowing an object, he has glimpsed the heart. Choi has not only grasped the traditional Confucian aesthetic embodied in the moon jar, but also deliberately and actively bestowed on it a new symbolic significance. In the language of Buddhism, “karma” is a concept related to the cycle of cause and effect, a belief in the transmigration of the soul and a recognition that past lives, this life and the lives to come all evolve from karmic causes and from fate, which no person may elude. In his artworks, the road of life with its countless, confusing side paths has became a journey of destiny in which the self is inseparable from others. Perhaps fate has no pessimistic implications.

Understood from a different angle, if we were to transform the concept of “karma” into the experience of the contemporary predicament of “globalization,” perhaps it would no longer be so mysterious and impenetrable. Ultimately, the many ecological crises imperiling our survival which we face in the age of globalization are the accretion of humanity’s collective past, and the fate we all must shoulder together.

They are our karmic legacy, and our karmic connection. Put more precisely, within this “universal” of the white porcelain moon jar, Choi Young Wook slowly, patiently depicts one image after another with the unique individual life philosophy and vision of an artist, and while the traces of each image seem discernible, in fact it is impossible to map the trajectory of its life in advance. Among the interweaving crackled seams, the viewer clearly sees a network of lines that form a plane, as if the atlas of a person’s fate, or a portrait of the complexities of an interpersonal relationship, or a microcosm of the human condition in the age of globalization. Here, metaphorically transformed by the artist, the white moon jars become vessels of life. The predestination and open-endedness of life, the possibilities and impossibilities, enter the viewer’s eyes, half-hidden yet manifest, as a patterned form like an abstract code, testing our ability to glimpse invisible spirit and wisdom.