Inhwa Lee
“About fifteen years ago, I accidentally crafted a ceramic piece with a paper-thin section. I set it aside without much thought, but when sunlight passed through it, the thin porcelain glowed with a silvery gray, while the thicker areas turned celadon green. That moment revealed to me that even light has expressions. Since then, I’ve devoted myself to creating white porcelain that captures and holds light...”
Looking back into history, Yanggu White Clay/ Porcelains were at the heart of the lives of people in Bangsan, Yanggu, Gangwon-do, Southkorea. Yanggu White Clay, which boasts beautiful color and strength when fired in high temperature, was buried in large quantity under the ground of Bangsan region. In the old days, people of Bangsan carefully mined and collected white chunks from veins of white ores that they discovered wandering through surrounding mountains and riversides. The piles of precious white chunks were scraped away tens of thousands of times for impurities, grounded by mills into fine particles, and filtered through the water of Suipcheon River so only clay is left. For 400 years during the Joseon Dynasty, people of Bangsan supplied the clay to Bunwon, Gwangju in Gyeonggi-do by land and waterway. Pottery manufacturers started appearing in Bangsan during the late Goryeo Dynasty and flames of the kilns continued to burn until the modern times. The elders in the town still have faint memories of the pottery manufacturers at the foot of mountains... On this very site, Inhwa Lee and her husband study Yanggu White Clay at Yanggu White Porcelain Center.
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Inhwa Lee graduated from Seoul National University in 2011, where she completed her MA dissertation on the translucency of white porcelain. This idea corresponds with her in depth study at the at the Yanggu White Porcelain Research Center where she currently attends as a senior researcher from 2015. Yanggu has a rich history on Korean ceramics as the region was a major source of white clay for Joseon dynasty (1392-1910). She aims to preserve and pass down the cultural values of Yanggu region. Inhwa’s continual work as a creative artist as well as an avid researcher has been widely recognized. In 2018, she was nominated as a person of merit who highly contributed to the development of culture and arts, which led her to be awarded, ‘Young Artist of the Year’ by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism of Korea. Many of her works have been acquired world-widely by the prestigious institutions, including the Curia Romana in Vatican, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Oriental Museum of Durham University in Durham, the Museum of Modern Ceramic Art in Japan, the Changdeok Palace in Seoul, the Amore Pacific Museum in Seoul, and the Yanggu Porcelain Museum in Gangwondo.
