EALC 2109/5109: East Asian Ceramics

Featuring dozens of Korean paintings, sculptures, figurines, porcelain and textiles, this art book is explores the rich visual history of Korean peninsula. Korea is home to one of the longest and richest traditions in the world--yet it is one of the least known in the United States. San Francisco's Asian Art Museum was a pioneering advocate for bringing Korean art into this country. One of the first museums in the United States to have a gallery solely dedicated to Korean art, it has built up a remarkable collection of more than 750 art objects spanning millennia of Korean culture in a variety of mediums. More than 100 highlights of the collection are included here, along with detailed commentaries by Kumja Paik Kim, the museum's emeritus curator of Korean art, which together compose an accessible introduction to Korean art and culture. Dr. Kim has also contributed an essay that constitutes one of the most helpful overviews of Korean art currently available.

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Ceramics and Modernity in Japan offers a set of critical perspectives on the creation, patronage, circulation, and preservation of ceramics during Japan's most dramatic period of modernization, the 1860s to 1960s. As in other parts of the world, ceramics in modern Japan developed along the three ontological trajectories of art, craft, and design. Yet, it is widely believed that no other modern nation was engaged with ceramics as much as Japan--a "potter's paradise"--in terms of creation, exhibition, and discourse. This book explores how Japanese ceramics came to achieve such a status and why they were such significant forms of cultural production. Its medium-specific focus encourages examination of issues regarding materials and practices unique to ceramics, including their distinct role throughout Japanese cultural history. Going beyond descriptive historical treatments of ceramics as the products of individuals or particular styles, the closely intertwined chapters also probe the relationship between ceramics and modernity, including the ways in which ceramics in Japan were related to their counterparts in Asia and Europe. Featuring contributions by leading international specialists, this book will be useful to students and scholars of art history, design, and Japanese studies.

This innovative book narrates the history of a single object?a tea-leaf storage jar created in southern China during the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries?and describes how its role changed after it was imported to Japan and passed from owner to owner there. In Japan, where the jar was in constant use for more than seven hundred years, it was transformed from a humble vessel into a celebrated object used in chanoyu (often translated in English as tea ceremony), renowned for its aesthetic and functional qualities, and awarded the name Chigusa. Few extant tea utensils possess the quantity and quality of the accessories associated with Chigusa, material that enables modern scholars and tea aficionados to trace the jar?s evolving history of ownership and appreciation. Tea diaries indicate that the lavish accessories?the silk net bag, cover, and cords?that still accompany the jar were prepared in the early sixteenth century by its first recorded owner.

Handmade Culture is the first comprehensive and cohesive study in any language to examine Raku, one of Japan's most famous arts and a pottery technique practiced around the world. More than a history of ceramics, this innovative work considers four centuries of cultural invention and reinvention during times of both political stasis and socioeconomic upheaval. It combines scholarly erudition with an accessible story through its lively and lucid prose and its generous illustrations. The author's own experiences as the son of a professional potter and a historian inform his unique interdisciplinary approach, manifested particularly in his sensitivity to both technical ceramic issues and theoretical historical concerns. Handmade Culture makes ample use of archaeological evidence, heirloom ceramics, tea diaries, letters, woodblock prints, and gazetteers and other publications to narrate the compelling history of Raku,

This practical and supremely useful manual is the first comprehensive, hands-on introduction to Japanese ceramics. The Japanese ceramics tradition is without compare in its technical and stylistic diversity, its expressive content, and the level of appreciation it enjoys, both in Japan and around the world. Inside Japanese Ceramics focuses on tools, materials, and procedures, and how all of these have influenced the way traditional Japanese ceramics look and feel. A true primer, it concentrates on the basics- setting up a workshop, pot-forming techniques, decoration, glazes, and kilns and firing. It introduces the major methods and styles that are taught in most Japanese workshops, including several representative and well-known wares- Bizen, Mino, Karatsu, Hagi, and Kyoto. While presenting the time-tested techniques of the tradition, author Richard L. Wilson also accommodates modern technologies and materials as appropriate. Wilson has gathered a wealth of information on two fronts-as a researcher of Japanese pottery and art history, and as a potter who has studied and worked for years with master Japanese potters. In his introduction, he provides a short history of Japanese ceramics, and in closing he looks beyond traditional methods toward ways in which Western potters can make Japanese methods their own. Richly illustrated with 24 color plates, over 100 black-and-white photographs, and over 70 instructive line-drawings, Inside Japanese Ceramics is indispensable for potters as well as connoisseurs and collectors of Japanese ceramics. Above all, it is an invitation to participate-to study, make, touch, and use the exquisite products of the Japanese ceramic tradition.

The geographical location of the Korean peninsula, which lies at the eastern edge of Asia between China, Russia, and Japan, has been crucial to its history and culture. Divided into several states or kingdoms from early times and suffering invasion and occupation from China, Manchuria, Mongolia, and Japan, Korea nevertheless remained a unified country from the seventh century to the twentieth.This book traces the development of its culture through art and archaeology, beginning in the Neolithic period (c. 6000 B.C.). Buddhism, introduced to Korea from China during the first millennium A.D., was to become the dominant religion throughout the succeeding centuries, reaching its height of wealth and influence in the Koryo dynasty (918-1392) as the aristocratic lifestyle at court became increasingly lavish. Confucianism replaced Buddhism during the Choson dynasty (1392-1910), but both traditions continued to be represented. The illustrations include some of the highest achievements of Korean craftsmen, from precious metalwork, sculpture, and lacquer to celadons, painting, and printing.

The most well-known Korean ceramics are the celadon of the Goryeo Dynasty (918-1392) and the white porcelain of the ensuing Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910). The celadons of Goryeo, their grace and color tinged with feminine beauty, symbolize an artistocratic Buddhist culture, while the white porcelains from the Joseon are thought to typify a bureaucratic and scholarly Confucian society and are essentially masculine in tone, vigorous and orderly. Korea's traditional ceramic wares serve as a barometer for understanding Korean culture in that they most accurately reflect Korean aesthetics and the Korean worldview.

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This volume, consisting of five chapters and an introduction, includes discussion of a variety of artworks, ranging from gold adornments found in Silla tombs to Koryŏ Buddhist paintings scattered in modern museum and private collections, that provide insight into the religious practices, aesthetics, cross-cultural exchanges, and everyday life of the people who made, used, appreciated, and circulated them. Based on thorough investigations of these artworks, their social context, and related texts, the five chapters in this book elucidate the cross-cultural interactions between the peoples and regions of Korea, China and South and Southeast Asia during the Silla to Koryŏ periods.

289 colorplates, individual essays on 114 masterpieces from the Museum of Oriental Ceramics, Osaka, Japan.