5 Ceramic Techniques You Need to Know - Artsy
Handbuilding · Pinching · Slab Construction · Coil Construction · Wheel Throwing / Hand Throwing · Slip Casting.
modernize traditional practices
South Korean artist Minsoo Lee produces gorgeously precise, minimalist, and functional wares that draw from the porcelain tradition. Blue-and-white vessels with perfectly aligning geometric accents along each rim, they satisfy the brain like the moment after solving a puzzle. Lee aims to <anchor>modernize traditional practices</anchor> and he did so with +,–(2013) by applying multiple layers of porcelain slip one at a time (until each is semi-dry) into a mould on a spinning wheel. Welch says that slip casting is the best approach when “making multiple molds, which allows for numerous sets to be created in short order.” Although slip casting may seem like the most mechanical and restrained of the traditional techniques, Welch points to artists whose works contradict this assumption. “A few years ago I would have said slip casting seems the most limiting process and likely the least free,” he says, “but the work of Mathew McConnell subverts that idea. His work using a combination of casting and press moulding is, in my eyes, completely original…it’s rather spectacular actually.”
Tradition Meets Innovation in the Works of the Contemporary Ceramists at Gallery LVS | Artsy
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May 23, 2014 6:36PM

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For millennia, Korean craftspeople have been transforming their
country’s rich earth into some of the finest ceramics in the world. In time and
through practice, they have perfected techniques that have been passed down
through the generations, resulting in works in which form and function are
exquisitely merged. Keenly attuned to the ancient roots and illustrious history
of Korean ceramic production, the contemporary ceramists championed by Seoul’s Gallery LVS have staked their diverse approaches to this
earthy medium on tradition—to which they are bound, but by which they are never
confined.

These artists fall into two groups: those who nod to their
ceramist forebears, while pursuing their own vision, and those who carry
forward ancient techniques, with modern innovations. Minsoo Lee falls into the former camp, with his clever,
geometric “+, -” series. Walls and cuts characterize his nested vessels, each
one of which is composed of up to ten individual layers of porcelain, as evidenced
by the delicate, alternating blue and white lines ringing their edges. Plus and
minus signs cut into the lips of his cups and bowls, interrupting their clean
silhouettes with a dual reference to mathematics and the balanced angularity of
Hangul, the Korean alphabet. Inhwa Lee pushes the material properties of porcelain to
elegant extremes in her softly hued, subtly textured pieces. By combining
opaque and translucent, and white and colored clay, and sanding down the
surfaces of her work, she makes containers that seem to be formed of marbled
paper, which glow as light passes through their sides.

Serving as both counterpoint and complement to the work of artists
like Minsoo Lee and Inhwa Lee is that of the artists who have skillfully
modernized traditional practices, among them Se Yong Kim and Hang Taek Lim.
They turn out their wares from their base in Icheon, a famed center of ceramic
production nestled in South Korea’s northwestern region. With his focus on
Goryeo celadon, Se Yong Kim is on a 5,000-year continuum. Using his own
so-called “double openwork” technique, he makes vessels whose sides are
elaborately carved with intersecting and overlapping bamboo leaves, berries,
and other natural forms. Hang Taek Lim’s rounded vases are painted with imagery
of nature and highlighted with crimson, a highly prized and auspicious pigment,
whose formula he has researched and, ultimately enhanced, in the spirit of
twining tradition and innovation shared by all of the artists at Gallery LVS.

Artsy Editorial

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