Soluna's craft incubator shines spotlight on 5 emerging ceramists

The art group's Incubating Craft Makers 2024 guides blossoming talent from studio to gallery.

Yu Se-ri works on her Jupiter-inspired ceramics in her studio. [YU SE-RI]

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. This famous saying could not ring truer to young craftspeople who are now setting foot in the industry.

Without an agency to back them up, which is the case for most craftspeople, they’re usually left stumped on what to do, and even where to begin. In addition to churning out crafts, their responsibilities go as far as pricing, organizing exhibitions, public relations and even writing their own artist statements.

That’s where Incubating Craft Makers 2024 comes in as a lifesaver: an annual open call project targeted toward university students who dream of exhibiting and selling their own crafts one day. The project is hosted and organized by Soluna Art Group, a local art management company, and is in its third edition this year.

Among heaps of submissions, one winning team is offered mentoring sessions by craft experts and is financially sponsored for an exhibition at Soluna’s art gallery in Jongno District, central Seoul. The ultimate goal is to familiarize them with the working routine in the crafts field before they finally start their own independent studios.

A group of five ceramists with master’s degrees at Seoul National University have been selected for Soluna Art Group's Incubating Craft Makers 2024, their works shown here. [SOLUNA ART GROUP]

This year, the spotlight shone on a group of five ceramists with master’s degrees from Seoul National University (SNU). Their exhibit “We: Build Up” starts Tuesday and runs until the end of February.

Yu Se-ri, Yoon Jung, Lee Moon-jeong, Jin Hye-rin and Choi Ye-jae are all budding craftspeople in their mid-20s to early-30s who aim to create ceramics using the rawest material of clay and, as the title suggests, “build them up” with their hands and tools.

“I remember being asked what exactly we want to convey to our audience with ceramics during the evaluation process [for the Incubating project], which is something we had never really given much thought before,” Yu said. The Korea JoongAng Daily met with the quintet and Soluna’s curator, Lee Chae-rim, last week.

"Shadow of White" by Jin Hye-rin [SOLUNA ART GROUP]

"Born_083.055" (2023) by Choi Ye-jae [SOLUNA ART GROUP]

“Most of the time we would spend working on the ceramics, so we didn’t think much about the perspective of the viewer or industry, which we now realize how irresponsible that was.”

“And there are just so many tasks in putting an exhibition together, so we’re so relieved we have a chance to be supervised by professionals,” Yoon added. “An exhibit is much more than simply arranging artwork inside a venue; there’s work that needs to be done behind the scenes.”

Ceramics is arguably the most common art form, and according to Noh Il-hwan, CEO of Soluna Art Group, ornamental crafts and ceramics alone take up at least 70 percent of the entire crafts industry. It’s especially a dog-eat-dog world for ceramists, he says.

The essential key to standing out, albeit the hardest for any artist to figure out, was to keep to the basics and find ways to revamp their own style, which they found in clay.

"Float" (2023) by Yoon Jung [SOLUNA ART GROUP]

"Vanishing Lines" by Lee Moon-jeong [SOLUNA ART GROUP]

“Whether it be through technique or material, it’s always been a challenge figuring out how we could express our values through pottery uniquely,” Yu said. Examples include analyzing the properties of clay and firing them at different temperatures from the usual 1,200 degrees Celsius (2,192 degrees Fahrenheit), or customizing clay through mixing with other materials like stone, wood or even coffee grounds.

But it’s certainly no coincidence as to why ceramics boast a deep history that dates back to at least 24,000 B.C. and is one of the most universal crafts out there. Ceramics tend to be more forgiving in that they can always be modified during the sculpting process, as opposed to others like woodwork, because once the material is cut, there’s no going back.

“I tend to see where the process leads me, so the piece can always turn out bigger or smaller than what I initially thought in my head,” Choi said. “You can experiment along the way as well.”

“There’s a lesser fear that we might mess up,” Yu said, “which means that there is less waste since we can always reuse the clay.”

“That’s why crafts are so powerful; you can succeed with enough effort and without necessarily having to be a genius,” Yoon said. “In the crafts world, it doesn’t matter how gifted and how exquisite your senses are – you can’t achieve anything if you don’t put the creation process into action with your hands.”

The following is a dive into each craftsperson’s ceramics.

"Twilit White Porcelain Oval" by Yu Se-ri [SOLUNA ART GROUP]

Yu Se-ri Reminiscent of the stripes and swirls of Jupiter, the making of Yu’s “Twilit White Porcelain Oval” involves rotating, just like the giant gas planet. Yu mixed white and stoneware clay, the latter of which usually has a reddish undertone, and spins them on a potter’s wheel. This process allows the two different types of clay to intertwine and create arbitrary stripes that Yu makes thinner or thicker as she pleases. After the wheel throwing is finished, the surface is trimmed with a sharp tool to fully bring out the pattern.

Pigmented clay, shown in blue here, covers the dark stoneware via countless dots in Yoon Jung's ceramics. [YOON JUNG]

Yoon Jung Yoon’s stoneware is covered with countless dots. After wheel throwing the stoneware, she carves out every single tiny dot after which she will apply engobe, a type of pigmented clay used for decorating. Yoon experiments with the different substances of clay, as engobe is watery and stoneware clay is firmer and denser. In Yoon’s words: “Stoneware is like the canvas and the engobe is the paint.”

Lee Moon-jeong creates paper-thin ceramics with a plaster mold on a potter's wheel. [LEE MOON-JEONG]

Lee Moon-jeong Arguably creating the thinnest ceramics among the SNU team, Lee’s pieces have a distinctively foggy appearance with square patterns. Pigments were trickled down from the rim for vertical patterns, or spun on the potter’s wheel for horizontal patterns. The thinness of the ceramic is achieved by pouring liquid clay into a plaster mold and wheel throwing it. With the final result almost as slim as paper, light is even able to penetrate through the sides.

Jin Hye-rin presses small, rectangular stamps onto the surface of her ceramics. [JIN HYE-RIN]

Jin Hye-rin These potteries are also adorned with patterns, but they have been repeatedly pressed on with small rectangular stamps. Such stamping techniques have a record going as far back as the Neolithic Age’s comb-pattern potteries. The watery engobe that had been spread on the surface oozes out in between the edges of the stamps. Despite the number of stamps that are applied at the same time, it’s not much of a hassle, Jin says, as the engobe dries instantly.

A ceramic work in progress by Choi Ye-jae using the coiling technique [CHOI YE-JAE]

Choi Ye-jae Coiling is another method of creating pottery besides wheel throwing, which refers to rolling clay into sausage-like coil shapes and stacking them on top of each other. The ceramist may compress them together to smoothen the surface. Choi uses local soil from Sancheong County in South Gyeongsang, because she “wanted to acknowledge the beauty and specialties of Korea” in her works. She doesn’t filter out all the rocks or pieces of wood naturally in her soil and keeps them in the process, contributing to the roughness and irregular patterns in her ceramics.

BY SHIN MIN-HEE [shin.minhee@joongang.co.kr]