Bowl

All classes of Joseon society, from king and court to commoner, used the robust glazed stoneware called buncheong. This ware appeared in the fourteenth century and seems not to have continued in production after the end of the seventeenth, with the exception of seventeenth-century bowls made expressly for export to Japan. The impact of buncheong ware on the seventeenth-century Japanese ceramics industry, in particular the tradition of stoneware bowls used in the tea ceremony, cannot be overestimated. The irregular shapes and imperfections of glaze give this pottery an artless quality that was much revered by Japanese tea-masters, who commissioned special orders of buncheong bowls directly from potteries in Korea. Thus buncheong was elevated to a status far beyond anything it had enjoyed in its own country: for Korean royals, aristocracy, and peasants it was everyday utilitarian pottery, but for Japanese tea-masters these bowls embodied a high aesthetic ideal.