Park Young Sook: When Form Meets Gesture

Park Young Sook is a South Korean ceramicist celebrated for expanding the Moon Jar into a commanding, contemporary sculptural presence. Her work centers on white porcelain vessels and plates that retain subtle traces of clay’s physicality while aiming for refined smoothness through extremely high-temperature firing. Many of her pieces draw on the eobdaji technique: two separately thrown halves are joined and inverted, producing wavering curves and proportions that feel slightly off-kilter—part formal logic, part process artifact. A practiced maker with deep technical control, she has owned and operated her own kiln since 1979, using it to refine labor-intensive methods that produce luminous glaze gradients and firing-driven color shifts. For Park, reinterpreting the Moon Jar is both an act of preservation and a contemporary re-sighting of Korean ceramic history.

Lee Ufan is known for minimalist painting and painterly interventions that emphasize gesture as a material event rather than an image alone. His work often foregrounds the physical conditions of making—pressure, density, texture—and treats marks and surfaces as sites where form and emptiness coexist. In collaboration with Park Young Sook, Lee’s painterly approach meets her porcelain vessels and plates, turning the ceramic surface into a responsive field for gesture and materiality. The resulting conversation between brushstroke and fired glaze expands the interaction between viewer, artwork, and the space around it.