The Korean Onggi Potter (review)

BOOK REVIEWS107 tionship to the royal family. It appears on women's wardrobe chests from late nineteenth-century Kyongsang Province. There are numerous examples of metal decorated chests (pandad) from P'yongyang, Kaesüng, and Pakch'on, but furniture from more than these three locations should be studied before we say that North Korean furniture is characterized by metal decoration over decorative wood grain. On pages 154-158, the pomegranate decoration on Cheju Island chests is mistakenly described as a chrysanthemum. The portrayal of tools on pages 183-188 is extremely useful for an appreciation of the manufacture of Korean furniture. Most Korean furniture was not mass-produced, but rather handcrafted. It was fashioned with hand tools made by the carpenters themselves or by very small factories with a limited number of craftsmen. For this reason, they were not made according to rigorous established standards, but custom-made to the carpenter's physical size and taste. Among the tools portrayed in this volume, those in figures 89 and 91 are for making wooden shoes, and those in 93 and 98 are Japanese-style planing tools. In sum, this is an ambitiously conceived and lavishly executed tribute to the craftsmanship of Korean furniture. Insofar as it is the only comprehensive English-language reference work on the subject, however, it must be used with caution. Young-Kyu Park Pratt Institute of Art and Design Translated by Laurel Kendall American Museum of Natural History The Korean Onggi Potter, by Robert Sayers, with Ralph Rinzler. Smithsonian Folklife Studies, No. 5. Washington, D. C: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987. 292 pp. ; frontispiece plus 117 figures. The tension between technological change and aesthetic sensibility affects the contemporary artist in all quarters of the world: from Tokyo to Paris to New York. Merely making art that repeats the past is insufficient for an artist struggling to find a way to make aesthetic sense in the contemporary world. This tension is especially intense in the world of the crafts, where craftspersons are displaced from their niche in society with the breakdown of folk village life, as mass production along with plastics and synthetic fibers completely takes over, and the myriad details of everyday life, such as clothing, furniture, dwellings, and the preparing and serving of food are either abandoned or drastically altered. At the same time, because traditional crafts convey a simple, direct, and straightforward presence, while also evoking by their very shape and form the sense that they are utilitarian and are made to relate to human activity, we moderns find handmade crafts aesthetically appealing; they reassure us with their sense of security and stability. The Japanese pioneer in the folk art movement , Soetsu Yanagi, expressed that sentiment in his efforts, beginning in the 108BOOK REVIEWS twenties, to evoke awareness of the beauty of traditional folk crafts, at a time when Japan was undergoing rapid industrialization. Craftspersons are an increasingly endangered species in the industrialized world, for they must find a new place as some sort of artist in contemporary society, either by abandoning their craft and settling into a completely new occupation, or by attempting to find a new aesthetic expression in the crafts medium while still being able to find the scarce financial backing to continue their craft as an artist. If the latter, they often must abandon the communal values of folk pottery and adapt to the individualized ways of the studio artist, thus altering their relationship to the past and to their art medium. That tension is reflected in the plight of the Korean onggi potters, whose handmade wares were commonplace not so long ago, but are now rapidly being replaced by the manufacturers of plastic, metal, and other modern ware, and by the modern lifestyles that have rapidly spread throughout South Korea. The huge clay jars once used to store food are now being replaced by refrigerators. The authors of The Korean Onggi Potter report that in 1981 there were less than 250 onggi factories, about half of the total counted ten years earlier (p. 249). Furthermore, because of their almost outcaste status in traditional Korean society, displaced onggi potters abandon their craft, and do not seek out a new place in industrialized...