: The first American museum exhibition dedicated to the innovative
work of Korean contemporary ceramic artist Yoon Kwang-cho (born
1946) will be on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art,
September 2-December 31.
"Mountain Dreams: Contemporary Ceramics by Yoon Kwang-cho" will
include some 30 objects drawn from various museums and private
collections around the world. The exhibition will coincide with
the 27th Annual Philadelphia Museum of Art Craft Show and the
50th symposium of the American Ceramics Circle. The artist
himself will be in Philadelphia in early October to give
demonstrations and lectures as part of the museum's annual Korean
Heritage Weekend (October 3-5).
Acknowledged as one of the master potters of his generation in
his native Korea, Yoon bases his work on the traditional Korean
pottery known as punch 'ong (or buncheong), which is
characterized by its freedom of design, unusual shapes and coarse
potting. Yoon has adapted this traditional form to create his own
distinctive wares of triangular and rectangular shapes, with bold
swathes of white brushwork or characters incised on their
surfaces.
This is the first American museum exhibition devoted to
Kwang-cho. Felice Fischer, the Luther W. Brady curator of
Japanese Art and curator of East Asian Art said, "Yoon has taken
the best features of Korean traditional arts and made them his
own."
There will be a representative selection of Kwang-cho's ceramic
creations, from his first experiment with punch 'ong in 1975 -
still very much in the traditional vein - to his abstract,
painterly pieces of the 1980s and large-scale vessels of recent
years. His work will be installed in the North Auditorium Gallery
together with a number of examples of Korean furniture from the
museum's permanent collection.
In his contemporary translations of punch 'ong wares Kwang-cho
uses triangular and irregular rectangular shapes, with bold
swathes of white slip brushed over reddish clay. The surfaces are
given texture by gouges with a knife or nails, or irregular
paddling with a wooden paddle or his hands while the clay is
still wet.
Some of Kwang-cho's large-scale pieces are over two feet high,
with Buddhist texts from the "Heart Sutra" incised over the whole
surface. The act of copying a sacred text onto a ceramic vessel
is a spiritual event for the artist, who practices meditation as
part of his discipline in creating his ceramics.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art is on the Benjamin Franklin
Parkway at 26th Street. For information, 215-763-8100 or visit
philamuseum.org.
