Jogakbo,
joined onto clay
Angular form breaks the inertia of the round vessel.The aesthetic of joining, carried from cloth into clay.
Tradition, re-joined —
the patchwork made of clay
Kim Taehui is a ceramic artist who graduated from the Department of Ceramics at the Seoul National University of Science and Technology. This practice begins from a single premise: that tradition is not something to be preserved under glass, but a living language to be re-read, taken apart, and joined back together in a contemporary form.
Where most pottery accepts the round vessel as its native shape — the wheel turning clay toward the circle almost by gravity — Kim breaks that inertia, introducing angular form into the vessel, letting facets and edges interrupt the expected curve. The result is a ceramics that feels at once familiar and unsettled, traditional in material yet modern in its silhouette.
Onto these forms Kim joins the image of jogakbo (조각보) — the Korean patchwork wrapping cloth, traditionally pieced together from leftover scraps of fabric. Jogakbo is an art of thrift and of seams: small remnants, individually too modest to matter, are stitched edge to edge until they become a single cloth of unexpected beauty. Kim Taehui carries that grammar of joining onto the surface and structure of clay.
In doing so Kim draws a quiet line between two crafts that share a hidden logic. Both ceramics and jogakbo are arts of use and care — things made to be held, wrapped, set on a table, lived with. By translating the seam of the patchwork into the facet of the pot, Kim lets the two traditions speak to each other across the boundary of their materials.
The work, then, is less a departure from tradition than a re-reading of it. Each angular vessel asks the same patient question the patchwork cloth once asked: how do separate pieces, joined with care, become a whole worth keeping?
Major themes
- 1
Reinterpreting tradition
Tradition read not as something to preserve but as a living language to take apart and rejoin in contemporary form.
- 2
Angular form
Facets and edges that break the inertia of the round vessel — familiar in material, modern in silhouette.
- 3
The image of jogakbo
The grammar of the patchwork wrapping cloth — small scraps joined edge to edge — carried onto the surface and structure of clay.
About the artist
- MediumCeramics
- StudyGraduated from the Dept. of Ceramics, Seoul National University of Science and Technology.
- WorkReinterpreting traditional pottery — joining angular form and the image of jogakbo onto clay.
On jogakbo
Jogakbo (조각보) is the Korean patchwork wrapping cloth, pieced together from leftover scraps of fabric. An art of thrift and of seams, it turns small remnants — each too modest to matter alone — into a single cloth of unexpected beauty. It is at once a thing of use and a quiet aesthetic of joining.
Three essays —
on clay, the seam, and use
1Breaking the circle — why angular form
The wheel wants the circle. Spun clay finds its most natural rest in the round — the bowl, the jar, the cup, shapes so deeply woven into ceramic tradition that they can feel less like choices than like inevitabilities. Kim Taehui's first move is to refuse that inevitability.
By introducing angular form — facets, planes, edges where the curve was expected — Kim makes the vessel hesitate. The eye, accustomed to gliding around a pot, is stopped at a corner; the hand, reaching for a familiar round, meets a plane instead. This is not a rejection of tradition but a way of making it visible again. To break the circle, even slightly, is to remind the viewer that the round vessel was always a decision, never a law.
The angular form also prepares the surface for what comes next. A faceted body offers distinct planes — fields with edges, ready to be joined. Where a smooth round surface dissolves any seam, the angular vessel keeps the seam legible. The geometry of the pot and the geometry of the patchwork begin, here, to rhyme.
2The grammar of jogakbo — joining as an aesthetic
Jogakbo, the Korean patchwork wrapping cloth, was born of thrift. In a household where fabric was precious, the scraps left over from cutting clothing were too small to use and too valuable to discard. So they were kept, and joined — edge sewn to edge — until enough of them together made a cloth large enough to wrap a gift, a book, a bundle of belongings.
What began as economy became, over generations, an aesthetic. The seams that held the scraps together were not hidden but composed; the irregular fields of colour, each remnant a different size and tone, were arranged into a balance that no single bolt of cloth could have offered. Beauty here is the beauty of the join — of disparate pieces made to belong to one another without losing their difference.
It is this grammar that Kim Taehui carries onto clay — not painting a picture of a patchwork but borrowing its logic — the field, the edge, the deliberate seam. On the planes of these angular vessels, the image of jogakbo becomes a way of thinking about wholeness: not as a single, seamless mass, but as many things, joined with care, that have agreed to be one.
3The ceramics of use — two crafts of care
Beneath the formal conversation between vessel and cloth lies a shared ground: both ceramics and jogakbo are crafts of use. A pot is made to be held, filled, set on a table; a wrapping cloth is made to enclose, protect, carry. Neither is a thing to be looked at only. Each finds its meaning in the hand, in the daily life it serves.
This is why the pairing feels so natural rather than merely clever. Kim Taehui is not joining two ornaments but two practices of care — the care of the table and the care of the bundle, the keeping of food and the keeping of belongings. These angular, patchwork-imaged vessels remember that a made object is, first of all, a thing offered to another person's use.
In that sense the work quietly resists the idea that to reinterpret tradition is to abandon its functions. Kim modernises the silhouette and borrows the seam, but the work stays loyal to the oldest purpose of both crafts: to make something durable and beautiful that a person can actually live with. Tradition, re-read, returns not to the museum case but to the table.
From the angular vessel to the joined seam, Kim Taehui's work pursues a single, patient question: how do separate pieces, joined with care, become a whole worth keeping? That answer, shaped in clay, carries the grammar of jogakbo into a contemporary ceramics of use. Kim Taehui joins this campaign not as a subject of its cause but as a fellow artist in solidarity — so that the proceeds of the work might become a low-interest lifeline for artists facing financial exclusion today.
Selected Works
1 works are featured here.
Kim Taehui joined this campaign in solidarity with fellow artists. Every work sold flows directly into the artists' mutual-aid loan fund— a purchase becomes the next month's lifeline for an artist navigating financial exclusion today.
