"9:10, first floor please..."
Our team leaders Wendy and Seong met our group (Sichuan University, Waikato University + Woodbury University) 20 minutes before 9:30 to take us to our first activity on the trip: Korean Art.
In the basement of the Woosong Art Center is the studio of Young Jin Kim- a world renowned ceramic artist that has held shows from Seoul to SOHO, New York. Him and his wife run the studio and basically, have lots a fun.
Young Jin Kim: ceramics.
Young's studio is really amazing. There is work everywhere and all different types of clay and ovens. My ceramic studio in high school was pretty decent but didn't have over twenty (7 gal) jugs of red, orange, blue, and grey clays. His work also featured elongated forms of layered clay that I didn't know you can do before.
(recent work of Young Jin Kim)
my honey jar is better than yours...
Basic lesson of ceramics is that when making vase like objects, you either layer of use a spinning table for more complicated forms. Yet, the recent work of Young and his wife showed a different interpretation of a common context associated with ceramics: marriage. Their recent work feature both small square and obtuse forms carved with images of flowers and leaves. Most married couples that I know do actually own expensive china or ceramic Western tea sets that is often for special use or display only. This type of dinnerware is always white with colorful images of flowers and green stems.
This work was a big contrast of that traditional tea set display. It takes the notion of displaying nature through ceramics but through a more robust forms with an earthly-color palette. If you would to display ceramics with flowers, why play down the image with a tea cup?
"Mikey, megoo saram imeda?"
Yes, I am from America- I just cannot respond back in Korean just yet. Since none of us were language majors, our Korean language class was very basic. Korean language has a lot of deep tones with the vowels u and oo. It is an admired language in all the Asian countries (most Asian countries broadcast KBS Korean drama shows with subtitles-no dubbed versions.) But, I knew we couldn't be that good in three weeks. The first day was filled with confused looks and burst of laughter. We all loved our teacher because of her sense of humor but the lessons were very difficult. Til next time!
-mikey
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Pottery in the making . . . .
Pottery and Language Class helped me to feel more comfortable with the New Zealand students as we started to laugh at each other’s silliness. I did not learn much about Korean pottery itself, because the professor spoke in Korean. The instructors name was Young Jin Kim and he did a demo of how to make pottery in a stacking format. Everyone is our program got creative and cute with their project, and Mike got American by making a honey jar. This was a really fun experience, and it made me appreciate the beauty of pottery, because of all the gorgeous pottery I saw laying around the room.
Language class was a bittersweet experience.
We were a class of about fifteen students, and there were two types of students the ones from China that went to study in New Zealand or students from the United States. Lets just say that if there was a competition amongst the two groups to see who could learn Korean faster, America would me slaughtered. Mike and I had dinner with the Chinese students that night, because we figured from the experience in language class that we would need lots of help to survive Korea. That night I learned in Daejeon people are more likely to speak Chinese than English in Korea. Korea and China are most closely related in culture than America and Korea, and the close relationship Korean and Chinese languages demonstrate this cultural proximity.
-nancy
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