Reimagining The Moon Jar

The exhibition brings together Chung Sook Sohn, Hajeong Lee Rogers, In Sook Park, Joong Sik Kim, Manchul Oh, and Yejin Shin, artists working across Korea, the United States, and Europe.​ The Korean moon jar, or dalhangari, is one of the defining forms of Joseon-era white porcelain. Its luminous white surface, generous rounded volume, and subtle asymmetry embody an aesthetic grounded in restraint, balance, and natural form. Traditionally made by joining two separately thrown sections, each moon jar carries the quiet irregularities of the maker’s hand and the unpredictable effects of fire. Rather than pursuing geometric perfection, the form embraces variation, imperfection, and a sense of openness.​ Reimagining the Moon Jar considers what happens when this historic form is taken beyond the vessel itself. Across painting, ceramics, porcelain, clay, textile sculpture, jogakbo, and mixed media, the six artists translate the moon jar through distinct material and conceptual approaches. Their works engage with memory, time, cultural exchange, process, and materiality, revealing how a centuries-old Korean form can continue to generate new images and meanings.​ Chung Sook Sohn approaches the moon jar through painting, incorporating its familiar silhouette into a richly composed pictorial language. Her work brings the vessel into the realm of Korean figurative painting, using color and form to evoke its quiet visual presence.​ Hajeong Lee Rogers, trained in ceramics in Seoul and based in the United Kingdom, brings Korean ceramic traditions into dialogue with British craft. Drawing on techniques including buncheong and white-clay inlay alongside contemporary pattern and surface treatments, her work reflects a practice shaped by both Korean heritage and her experience in the UK.​ For In Sook Park, the moon jar is closely connected to memory and time. Her paintings bring together recurring images of houses, flowers, and moon jars, moving between remembered landscapes and imagined futures. Through layering, scraping, and reworking the surface, she gives physical form to the accumulation and erosion of memory.​ Joong Sik Kim, known for his “Double Pop Art,” places Korean moon jars in dialogue with portraits and imagery from Western visual culture. By layering Eastern and Western imagery and combining painting with silkscreen, Kim creates works in which the moon jar becomes a microcosm—a vessel for emotion, desire, history, and the traces of human experience.​ Manchul Oh extends painting into the ceramic medium through his distinctive practice of “1330°C Painting.” Working with kaolin, high-temperature pigments, and glazes in Jingdezhen, China, Oh allows fire and clay to become active components of the image. His works explore the luminosity of porcelain, the delicate patterns of crazing, and the traces left by earth and fire, transforming the physical qualities of the moon jar into a pictorial surface.​ Based in Los Angeles, Yejin Shin works with traditional Korean textiles including handwoven ramie, silk, hemp, and vintage fabrics. Rooted in jogakbo, the Korean tradition of patchwork, she joins fragments of fabric through hand stitching to create sculptural interpretations of the moon jar. The softness and translucency of textile introduce light, shadow, and surrounding space into the form, allowing the work to shift with changing conditions throughout the day.​ Across these practices, the moon jar becomes more than a historical object. It can hold memory and longing, bring different cultural traditions into dialogue, register the passage of time through material and process, or become a structure for light and space. What remains constant is the openness of the form and its capacity to be continually reimagined.​ Reimagining the Moon Jar brings together six distinct approaches to a form deeply embedded in Korean visual culture. Rather than reproducing the moon jar as a symbol of the past, the exhibition considers its continuing relevance through contemporary practices shaped by different places, generations, and materials. Together, the works reveal the enduring power of a form defined not by perfection, but by balance, presence, and possibility. ​