A full white volume that refuses to be perfectly round. Thrown in two halves and luted at the waist, so the seam pulls it slightly off true, and the asymmetry is the point. Joseon dynasty, early 18th century, white porcelain. The austere Confucian aesthetic: nothing added, the glaze almost no color, the form carrying itself on emptiness. Early 20th-century Mingei scholars loved exactly this imperfection.
Provenance - where he pointed
Pointed at by Namjoon.
RM’s 2019-11-17 tweet featured a moon jar (달항아리) by the contemporary ceramist Kwon Dae Sup; on meeting Kwon he is said to have called it “exactly Korea.” The post sent a generation looking up the Joseon white-porcelain moon jar.
- Primary source: @BTS_twt, 2019-11-17 (archived here).
Why it matters: the door
(fill in: what the off-true white volume opens, why the moon jar pulls.)
Grows into
- 留白: the jar as negative space given a wall, restraint made into an object; emptiness that holds its shape.
First seen
- Museum of Fine Arts Boston · September 2022. A Joseon early-18th-century jar in the collection, met the same day as Philip Guston Now. “Found the moon jar.”