PARK YOUNG SOOK

A celebrated and renowned ceramicist in Korea, Park is best known for her Moon Jars, round porcelain vessels named for their full shape and luminous glaze, which first appeared in Korea in the 17th century. Park’s Moon Jars, however, are larger than those produced in centuries past. Her porcelain works exceed two feet (70 cm) in height with a proportional circumference, taking on a commanding presence in space. Their surfaces range from snow white to milk white to blue-tinged white; variations in color are the result of the firing process. Park’s use of the eobdaji technique—in which two separately thrown halves are joined and inverted—emphasizes wavering curves and slightly misaligned proportions in the formal language of her compositions. Each of the artist’s Moon Jars is imbued with its own distinct personality and idiosyncrasies in contour, glaze, and silhouette. At the heart of Park’s practice is her dedication to reinterpreting the traditional Moon Jar through a contemporary lens while maintaining a sustained and meaningful dialogue with Korea’s rich history of ceramic art.

Born in 1947 in Gyeongju, the former capital of the Silla Kingdom (57 BCE–935 CE), Park grew up immersed in Buddhist relics, artworks, and ancient temples. Through her white porcelain and buncheong ware that retains subtle traces of the raw physicality of clay, she explores living tension and force as opposed to resolved form. The artist has owned and operated her own kiln since 1979, refining and perfecting her labor-intensive, highly technical, meditative process to create delicate forms and unique color gradients in her works. Fired at extremely high temperatures, the surfaces of Park’s Moon Jars are exceptionally smooth and dense.

Since the early 1980s, Park and Lee Ufan have maintained a collaborative relationship, with Lee using Park’s porcelain vessels and plates as surfaces for his painterly interventions and explorations of gesture and materiality in ceramics. Lee has long been drawn to Korean ceramics, particularly Moon Jars, whose subtle irregularities he has described as possessing an “elusive variability” that creates a distinct “visual resonance.” Lee has been a mentor to Park for many years, regularly visiting her at her Seoul studio, and this exhibition at Pace Seoul will shed light on the relationships between their practices.

Holistically, When Form Meets Gesture explores the ways that form and gesture reveal themselves through one another. Park’s porcelain sculptures are embodiments of condensed time, matter, and repeated actions, connecting with Lee’s philosophies on the aesthetic of emptiness and the relationship between a viewer, an artwork, and the space they inhabit. Variations in brush pressure, pigment density, and texture emphasize the essential act of mark making that defines Lee’s practice, while the luminous ceramic surface introduces a distinct material presence.

This presentation focuses on the new possibilities that emerge when Lee’s painterly gesture—the tension and flow created by a single brushstroke—transcends the canvas to meet the three-dimensional materiality of Park’s porcelain. Upon the smooth surface of the ceramic, the brushstroke permeates more naturally and organically, expanding the depth and sensorial effects of color and abstraction that are difficult to capture on a flat plane. Within the artists’ collaborations, Park’s technical mastery of porcelain and Lee’s minimalist painterly language converge to create works that move fluidly between painting, sculpture, action, and form.