Jar: Hun Chung Lee

Hun Chung Lee, who has long shaped art through clay, fire, and the language of the body, presents in his Seoul and Daegu exhibitions two interrelated inquiries: “What is the memory of clay?” and “What is the essence of beauty?”

In Seoul, 《Hun Chung Lee - 色 & Object》 traces a journey in which the temporal layers inherent in clay are expanded through the immediacy and sensoriality of color. In Daegu, 《Hun Chung Lee - Jar》 revolves around the moon jar, reexamining traditional aesthetic norms and questioning what it means to experience living beauty today.

For Lee, clay is far more than a material—it is a medium that preserves the memory of the body. The repeated turning of the wheel, the clay’s resistance and yielding, and the unpredictability of fire capture rhythms sensed by the artist’s body. His practice is less about predetermined completion than the oscillation between play and control; its essence lies not in the final object, but in the immediate experience at the fingertips—Erlebnis. Within this process, the body becomes not merely a tool but a subject of creation.

Lee’s aesthetic arises from attentiveness to the order of nature without relinquishing will or thought. Sitting before the kiln, he seeks not to “control” fire, but to feel it, embracing cracking and discoloration not as failure but as part of the generative process. Where uncontrollable natural flows meet human labor, the work becomes a form of meditative practice.

In Seoul, his color paintings reveal a temporality distinct from ceramics. Unlike glazes that slowly transform in the kiln, pigments appear immediately on the surface. Lee applies dots and lines as if rolling up clay, translating the rhythms memorized through the wheel into the flow of color. Painting as an extension of ceramic thinking, becomes less a vehicle of narrative reproduction than a disciplined practice of concentration and tension. Accompanying ceramic objects demonstrate the “fired life” formed through repeated manual labor and the intensity of heat.

In Daegu, Lee reinterprets the iconic Korean moon jar. Questioning socially codified notions of beauty, he presents a living aesthetic through surface undulations, cracks, and distortions. Their imperfection becomes their truth, where the breath of clay, traces of fire, and the artist’s presence coexist. This is not a denial of tradition, but a mode of “learning through deconstruction,” interrogating essence through the disassembly of images.

Ultimately, these exhibitions stand at the intersection of the time remembered by clay and the moments perceived by humans. Imbuing clay with color opens a dialogue between nature and humanity, memory and sensation, tradition and modernity. The moon jar emerges as both a formal and philosophical response within this conversation. Traversing Seoul and Daegu, Lee’s journey unfolds as an endless seesaw between clay and fire, body and mind, tradition and freedom—a delicate oscillation that records his ongoing meditation on the questions: What is art? What is beauty?