Koo Bohnchang: The Look of Things

Vessel

〈Vessel BM 04 BW〉, 2006.

Printed on linen
173×131 cm
White Porcelain Moon Jar, Joseon Dynasty,
The British Museum

The series, one of the artist’s major works, is photographs of white porcelain housed in sixteen domestic and international museums since 2004. In 1989, the artist happened to see a photo of a moon jar with a foreign woman in a magazine and thought sadly about the white porcelain lying around somewhere in a foreign country. Thirteen years later, in 2002, when he saw a white porcelain from the Joseon Dynasty introduced in a Japanese magazine, he recalled that memory from a long time ago. Since then, the artist started the series by searching for and photographing white porcelain scattered all over the world. The woman in the photo was Austrian-born potter Lucie Rie, and in 1935 the moon jar was purchased in Korea by a potter Bernard Leach, who was her teacher, and brought to England. Finally, in 2006, Koo was able to photograph the moon jar in the photo that is housed in the British Museum in London. Koo’s representative series was photographed in a way that seemed to float without shadows, emphasizing round volume and simple lines of the white porcelain. In this exhibition 14 pieces of white porcelain from overseas museums, including the Japan Folk Crafts Museum in Tokyo, the Koryo Museum of Art in Kyoto, the Museum of Oriental Ceramics in Osaka, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, the British Museum in London, and the Guimet National Museum of Asian Arts in Paris, and presented in the form of large hanging scrolls printed on 5.5 meters long fabric.