Platter

For the contemporary Korean studio potter Yoon Kwang-cho, "buncheong is a challenge to the general notion that things fine and elaborate are beautiful. Buncheong lies beyond the concept of aesthetics, like nature herself.” This uniquely Korean ceramic tradition has rustic qualities that Yoon seeks to emulate in his stoneware pieces, and they are clearly present in this rough platter. He employed, for instance, ordinary straw blades to inscribe the desired linear patterns through the moist, irregularly brushed white slip (liquid clay) that overlays the coarse dark clay surface. Traditional buncheong sometimes featured a variety of bird and plant imagery (see Smart Museum acc. no. 2003.7), but the abstracted landscape of Yoon’s platter celebrates instead the remote mountain recesses, viewed in moonlight, of the countryside in the southern part of the Korean Peninsula where Yoon lives and works. The artist credits these surroundings, which he calls the “Windy Valley,” with renewing his understanding of nature. Yoon believes that the underlying spirit of reverence for nature embodied in the platter’s imagery and the unmediated artistic processes that reveal this sentiment spring also from his embrace of Zen Buddhist meditation and Japanese Tea Ceremony practices—and from the creative detachment they allow him when he begins a ceramic piece.