AAM 002

The artist purposefully selects pure whiteware (or dark stoneware) pieces and plays with composition and subtle differences in the tones and shapes of vessels. This is a photograph of two whitewares in the Asian Art Museum’s collection: the bottle and the moon jar displayed in this gallery. In a conventional museum display, two vessels might not be placed as close together as in Koo’s work. In his contemporary photograph, the jar’s roundness appears in dialogue with the S-curve of the bottle. The empty space between them becomes prominent, and the contours of both ceramics are vivid. The overall pinkish color was not artificially added to the image; the artist placed traditional Korean paper in the background when shooting, and the pink is a reflection caused by the camera’s flash.

Koo visited the Asian Art Museum in December 2011 and photographed about forty Korean whiteware ceramics in the collection, adding layers of interpretation to the traditional ceramics made hundreds of years ago.