On November 15th, 2023, I went to the Brooklyn Museum on the hunt for two objects: a vase and a bowl made over 300 years ago.

I found the vase first, in a shadowy corner of the Korean Arts Gallery. It's small, mottled green in color, with simple decoration in both white and dark slip. Among the noble porcelain moon jars and green celadon wares that shine like trophies in the collection, the vase seemed humble. Below the object, a written placard makes a similar observation. 

“The lines of the design are thicker and less controlled than in the technique of the previous dynasty. The hand-drawn rendering of the cranes seated on willow trees has a naive charm seen in many later buncheong wares.” 

Buncheong. It's a style of Korean pottery described by Soyoung Lee for the Metropolitan Museum of Art as “a loose group of ceramics with a relatively coarse gray body embellished in various fashion with white slip and covered in green-tinted semi-translucent glaze.” Buncheong is considered a bit of an underdog in Korea’s ceramic history. Its production throughout the 15th and 16th centuries yielded a body of work that is distinctly rustic, practical, and surprising.

The bowl I mentioned was just a few paces away from the vase, and encompassed all three of these characteristics. A dark stamped pattern lines the inside curvature, comprised of small dots and radial flowers. The pattern is mostly obscured, however, due to a veil of white slip applied unevenly all over the bowl by a broad brush. The streak marks show loose circular motions. 

I was kind of agitated by this decision. Why mask your design with an unruly wash of color? 

But the more I looked, the more I understood. It's freeing. It's unconventional, and unabashedly so. The vase and the bowl — two works of buncheong — stood out to me as seedlings of modernity in Korea's long and ornate ceramic tradition.

I thought of the artists on the precipice of a new movement — the many different people who would be able to access this kind of simple and imperfect earthenware and pass it on, nurture it, watch it grow.

(02:30)

And then I found out that after just two centuries of production, buncheong abruptly disappeared. It was long considered a lost art. 

My trip to the museum left me with questions about buncheong's death and rebirth, as evidently it's known to the art world now. I began piecing together the story.

At the end of the 16th century, buncheong was on the other side of its zenith. Minimalist white porcelain was gaining popularity in tandem with the rise of Neo-Confucian values, which tempered the production of the more folksy ware. 

But in 1592, terror broke out on the Korean peninsula. Japanese warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi launched an invasion in an attempt to conquer Korea and China proper. At the time, it was the largest seaborne attack in history, consisting of an estimated 158,000 soldiers. This was not matched or exceeded in scale until the Normandy landings in 1944. 

This invasion and the subsequent conflicts that persisted until 1598 decimated the Korean pottery industry.

(03:37)

In many cases, potters and other artisans and laborers were forcibly taken to Japan. In the following years of restoration, white porcelain resumed production in Korea, but buncheong did not. It reappeared much later, during Japanese colonialism in the first half of the 20th century, when Korean art historians sought to reclaim the style that had been up until that point, an unnamed art phenomenon. 

But throughout those three centuries in Japan, something interesting happened. The ceramics industry flourished with newly inspired works. There arose a variety of what Soyoung Lee calls “buncheong idioms” in Japanese ceramic tradition. Many different techniques were emulated, such as the popular use of stamps to decorate vessels. Regional trends created a vast mosaic of works that directly and indirectly echoed traditional buncheong. These iterations served as a continuous source of inspiration for ceramic artists in Japan. Development within the scope of pottery continued largely unimpeded — generation to generation.

Upon learning of this second life of buncheong, I felt almost defensive. It seemed unfair that Japan got to see the proliferation and transformation of an art form that was deeply, characteristically Korean, especially considering that the methods by which they attained the means for buncheong were violent and imperialistic. But then I thought about the fact that buncheong was alive at all, and about its poignant evolution in a foreign land. 

I fell down a tunnel thinking about what constitutes cultural authenticity.

This was something I've struggled with in the context of my own racial identity. I'm the daughter of a Korean adoptee. I have no ties to Korea besides my genetic code, which has left me with a swirling anxiety about the validity of who I am. I recognized in buncheong an analogous displacement and diasporic experience.

Hoping to flesh out this budding connection, I spoke with Caitlin Beach, an assistant professor of art history at Fordham University, affiliated faculty in African and African American studies, and the interim director of the Asian American Studies Department at the Rose Hill campus.

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CAITLIN:

Whatever question of authenticity someone's going after is always so subjective, and it's always a construction. What are people looking for when they're looking for something that's authentic? Are they looking for something that's older, that has kind of like some sort of age value? Is it something that harks back to a pre-colonial moment in some ways? And so I think that is something to think about.

NORA:

And also it just like kind of raises a lot of questions about what, in a nation's sort of classification of their own culture, how do we kind of source out what we deem is most representative of the people? How do you separate all of these Japanese works from the Korean roots? Because if it was inspired and in some cases produced by Korean artists in Japan, how do we not call that buncheong? You know? 

CAITLIN:

Yeah, absolutely. I think it's really helpful for thinking about diaspora as not necessarily derivative of, or like lesser than, its potential source — if that source exists at all. And to be Korean is to be part of a diaspora. It's not like a center-periphery thing, but it's like this is a larger network. You know, Korea's a part of it, but so is Japan. So is the United States. So are places where people were adopted to, like it's all part of this web. There's no center necessarily. Like the center is what we may construct for ourselves.

NORA:

Our conversation continued, and Caitlin raised really salient points about how anthropologists of the Black Atlantic in particular have come to view diasporic culture. In the end, she left me with a historical anecdote about Senegal in the 1960s, following their independence from French colonial rule.

CAITLIN:

The first president of Senegal in the 1960s, really is interested in kind of pre-colonial African art. He encourages artists to sort of, you know, get rid of art from foreign or international influences, particularly European influences, because that carries with it the violence of colonialism. So he says like, “go back to the source.” But it of course, it turns out that like even going back to sort of a pre-colonial source in a lot of ways is sort of an imagined construction that, you know, artists’ fanciful depictions of masks and stuff that are ironically and paradoxically influenced by sort of euro-colonial ideas about, you know, primitivizing cultures and stuff. It's really interesting the ways that like, a quest for authenticity is used as a method. I think it's not necessarily a thing that exists into itself, but to think of it as a process or a strategy or a technique that people are, you know, they're searching for something.

(08:48)

I set out on this project wanting to demonstrate how we can understand art history as our own history. I recognized in buncheong a parallel story to that of my mother's adoption and the continuation of her lineage in a new homeland. As I learned of buncheong’s legacy in Japan, I found myself pulling questions from the interrogation of my own identity and shining them outward onto art.

Buncheong is one of the many fragments of Korea that washes up on my shores. I scavenge obsessively for these little clues as if they'll spell out the obvious explanation — as if a hoard of cultural anecdotes could prove me, answer for me. 

My mother and I are haunted by the same specter of lost family, but she doesn't grasp at the mist the way that I do. She holds on to what is as real and warm as the blood coursing through her veins. She holds me.