Essay: ART and / or CRAFT

I am often asked whether I consider my work art or craft. The question appears simple, yet the more I work with clay, the more I find myself questioning the distinction itself.

Art and craft are often presented as separate disciplines, even as opposites. Art is associated with freedom, expression, and ideas, while craft is associated with skill, repetition, and utility. Yet this division has never felt convincing to me. Every work of art depends upon making. Every sculpture, painting, or installation requires knowledge of materials, processes, and techniques. In this sense, art cannot exist without craft.

At the same time, there are differences. A master craftsperson may spend decades refining the same form, producing objects for others to use and live with. Artists are often expected to pursue originality and create something new. Yet even this distinction quickly becomes unstable. Claude Monet painted the same cathedral and water lilies countless times, but each painting remained unique. Constantin Brancusi's sculptures are celebrated not only for their conceptual clarity but also for their extraordinary craftsmanship in wood, stone, and metal. The boundaries are never as clear as they first appear.

Historically, the separation between art and craft is relatively recent. Before the eighteenth century, painters, sculptors, goldsmiths, potters, and architects belonged to overlapping traditions of skilled making. During the Renaissance, artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were admired not only for their ideas but also for their technical mastery. Art and craft were not understood as fundamentally different activities.

The distinction emerged gradually through social and institutional changes. As academies and museums developed, painting and sculpture became associated with intellectual prestige, while ceramics, textiles, weaving, decoration, and other material practices were increasingly categorized as decorative or applied arts. These classifications reflected broader structures of class, labor, gender, and cultural value. Practices connected to domestic life and manual work were often considered less significant than those associated with intellectual production.

Yet this hierarchy has never gone unchallenged.

In the nineteenth century, William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement argued against the growing separation between art, labor, and everyday life. Morris believed that beauty should not belong exclusively to museums or elite culture. It should also exist in furniture, textiles, books, wallpaper, and the ordinary objects that accompany daily life. For him, making was not merely a technical activity but an ethical one. Craft represented a resistance to industrial standardization and the alienation brought about by mass production.

A similar sensitivity can be found in East Asia, particularly in the ideas that later shaped the Japanese Mingei movement. Deeply influenced by Korean ceramics, Yanagi Sōetsu saw beauty not in individual genius but in humble objects made through repetition, care, and necessity. He admired everyday vessels created by anonymous makers and argued that true beauty often emerges without self-conscious striving.

Yanagi's writings have remained important to me. Not because I wish to imitate the past or romanticize tradition, but because they encourage a different way of looking. They remind me that beauty is not always found in perfection, originality, or novelty. Sometimes it appears through use, through modesty, through materials that reveal their own nature rather than conceal it.

These ideas resonate strongly with my own experience of clay.

As a ceramic artist trained in sculpture, I often think about form through weight, balance, proportion, and presence. Clay constantly reminds me that thought and material cannot be separated. Form emerges through the hands, through repetition, through failure, and through attention. Working with clay means entering into a conversation with gravity, moisture, time, and fire. The material resists complete control, and this resistance is part of the work itself.

This understanding eventually led me to the Moon Jar.

Among the many forms found in ceramic history, the Moon Jar occupies a special place in my work. Originating in the Joseon Dynasty, Moon Jars are often celebrated for their large spherical form and luminous white surface. Yet what moves me most is not their perfection, but their imperfection.

Traditionally, Moon Jars were made by joining two separately thrown hemispheres. As a result, they are rarely symmetrical. Their curves shift subtly. Their proportions are often irregular. The seam where the two halves meet can sometimes be sensed beneath the surface. These qualities are not flaws. They are precisely what give the form its humanity and presence.

The first time I encountered a Moon Jar, I felt as though I had discovered a form I had been searching for without knowing it. Its quiet asymmetry, restraint, and generosity seemed to contain a balance between opposites: fullness and emptiness, monumentality and humility, strength and vulnerability.

Perhaps this is why I continue returning to the form.

At the same time, my interest in Korean ceramics has led me toward questions that extend beyond Korea itself. I am deeply interested in the historical relationship between Korean and Japanese ceramic traditions, particularly the cultural exchanges that emerged through periods of conflict and displacement. The history of ceramics in East Asia is inseparable from migration, transmission, adaptation, and transformation. Techniques, materials, and aesthetic ideas moved across borders, often under difficult historical circumstances.

Within this broader context, I became fascinated by Kintsugi.

Kintsugi is often understood as a technique for repairing broken ceramics with lacquer and precious metals. It is frequently interpreted as a metaphor for healing or resilience. While I appreciate these associations, my own interest in Kintsugi is primarily formal and material.

In some of my works, Kintsugi appears not as repair but as an intentional structural element. When constructing certain Moon Jars, I use Kintsugi-inspired joins to connect two separately thrown forms. Rather than concealing the seam, I choose to emphasize it. The line becomes visible. It acknowledges the act of joining and reveals how the object came into being.

For me, these lines are not symbols of damage. They are records of connection.

They speak of the relationship between separate parts that become a whole while still retaining traces of their individuality. They suggest that completeness does not require seamlessness and that unity can emerge through visible difference.

In this sense, Kintsugi and the Moon Jar meet naturally. Both reveal an acceptance of imperfection. Both allow process to remain visible. Both resist the desire for flawless uniformity.

For this reason, I do not see craft as the opposite of art. Rather, I see craft as a condition of making. Craft is not merely a category of objects but a way of engaging with materials and processes. It is grounded in embodied knowledge, accumulated experience, and sustained attention.

The critic Glenn Adamson has argued that craft should not be understood as a fixed category of objects, institutions, or people, but as a mode of action—a way of doing. This understanding resonates deeply with my own experience. Craft is not confined to tradition; it continually evolves through new materials, new contexts, and new forms of thinking.

Perhaps, then, the question is not whether a work is art or craft. A more meaningful question is why this distinction exists, whose values it reflects, and what assumptions it carries. The boundary between art and craft is not natural or timeless. It is historically constructed, continuously negotiated, and constantly being reimagined.

In my own practice, I am less interested in defending one category against the other than in exploring the space where they meet. It is in that space—between thought and material, tradition and experimentation, object and idea—that my work takes shape.

Ceramics are an interdisciplinary, intergenerational, and intercultural language, capable of traversing art, craft, design, architecture, and social practices without belonging exclusively to any one of these categories.

For this reason, I prefer not to define my work exclusively as either art or craft. I see my work as visual art realized through clay and ceramics, while remaining deeply connected to the histories, materials, and practices from which it emerges.