Joongang Ilbo - Pottery is for Serving Food

『Yoonshin Yi’s Story of Vessels』



There has once been a fad for the globalization of Korean food. People went out to search for foods that were worthy of representing Korea. There have even been broadcastings that claimed that street food was the answer and openly referred to ddukbokki (stir-fried rice cake), which was served in a plastic bowl, as the “representative food of Korea”. However, no one who thinks of themselves as an expert in Korean food has touched on the subject of the bowls. They only knew how to evaluate the taste and turned out to be surprisingly indifferent towards food culture, which is a key point for globalization.

Let’s take a look at the dining table of average Koreans. Most public restaurants use plastic tableware. Fancy restaurants use ceramics, but the majority is plain and dull white porcelain, probably used to make the food stand out. It isn’t much different in family dinner tables either. Except the exclusive upper class, people commonly use mass-produced tableware. There are many housewives who talk about their desires for European luxury ceramics amongst themselves, but very few who would open their wallets for a beautiful bowl made by our craftsmen. They say it’s because ‘they don’t understand much about ceramics’. The ceramics carefully put on display in museums is actually just tableware that people in the past used to use on a daily lives, so what is it about ceramics that they don’t understand?

『Yoonshin Yi’s Story of Vessels』 is a ‘manual on how to use ceramics’ written by an artist who regards herself as a messenger for everyday ceramics. It is a practical book that delivers the message to people who say ‘they don’t understand much about ceramics’ that “It is not a subject of admiration, but rather something for serving food”. It changes the fixed idea that tableware must come as a set. If you buy hand-crafted plates one at a time and use them differently, you will naturally find something to talk about at the dinner table. It delivers know-hows of the author on how to make your dinner table look great without putting much effort and even gives tips on how doing your dishes with kitchen towels is better than doing them with sponges.

However, it is not only about ceramics. It is also an essay about the author’s life which began in a semi-basement craft shop in Anyang 25 years ago and in which she struggled to make her own unique ceramics.

Yi, Yoonshin is a top notch potter. She studied ceramics at the school of art and Graduate School of Hongik University and even at the Kyoto City University of Arts in Japan. Beginning with her first private exhibition in Japan in 1984, she has participated in 20 private exhibitions and 100 group exhibitions. However, she did not produce any extraordinary pieces of art after becoming a university professor like others. She has continued to make ‘bowls’ that were filled with the warmth of earth and that was traditional, but not crude, and sophisticated.

The first time she became interested in pottery was during her studies in Japan. At first, she made sculptures at school too, but she confesses that they were a chunk of clay, which she couldn’t understand herself and couldn’t explain to others either. Instead, she was mesmerized by the hand-crafted potteries she found at friends’ houses, shops or various restaurants. The essence of pottery, which she realized in the best country of modern pottery, Japan, was the ‘bowl’. This is also the reason there are not many ceramics majors in Japanese universities. They do not strive to become professors and this is because the pottery market is so widespread and robust throughout the nation that it isn’t even necessary to go to university. What she really learned from this place was not how to make pottery, but how to ‘live a simple life enjoying culture’. She is now realizing this life through her own handmade pottery brand ‘Yido’ and her own restaurant ‘Yido Dining’. She has become a pioneer of food culture making bowls and dishes that go with the food well and skillfully using them. As Steve Jobs once dreamed of the day that everyone would use a personal computer one day and achieved that dream, she dreams of the day that all tables would be filled with handmade bowls and dishes. She sometimes says openly that she will become the ‘Chanel of pottery’.

What does this mean? Chanel liberated the bodies of women in the 1920’s from the corsets that suffocated them. She influenced the way of life of these women by making clothes in which they can move freely, and became a true cultural icon with her perceptions which were ahead of her time. Just as Chanel freed women’s fashion from the ‘corset of admiration’ to something more practical and beautiful, Yi has freed the ‘ceramics of admiration’ from its fixed idea to a more functional and beautiful tool, so it is not entirely nonsensical. That is, if the trend for a new food culture that regards beauty more than taste comes about in this bleak 21st century of Republic of Korea.