Free and Wild: Namhi Kim Wagner Revitalizes Korean Ceramic Tradition

At 93, Namhi Kim Wagner is still redefining the ancient art of Korean pottery. With works featured in the Museum of Fine Arts, she is one of the first American ceramicists to revive the Buncheong style of ceramics—an aesthetic that disappeared from Korean ceramic tradition at the close of the 16th century. Gallery 224, a Harvard-affiliated art exhibition center, will host a selection of her works works from March 23 to May 21.

Not simply a revitalization of Buncheong wares, Wagner’s exploration into the rich history of Korean ceramics attempts to use history as a starting point for her original expression of art. “To transcend copying, she uses some materials other than just traditional materials. She adds color. She adds a certain dynamism that isn’t there,” says Robert Mowry, former head of the Harvard Department of Asian Art and senior curator at the Harvard Art Museums. “It’s within the tradition of Buncheong wares, but it’s her own contemporary interpretation of it—a technical and aesthetic relationship with it, [as well as] modern breakthroughs.”

Nancy Selvage, the former director of the Ceramics Program at Harvard, also emphasizes the distinctive characteristics of Wagner’s works. “She quickly went through the whole history of Korean ceramics—digested it—and then went beyond and made very personal, individual, expressive, new work. It’s a new contemporary contribution to Korean traditional work,” she says.

As part of a lecture series introducing Wagner’s works, Mowry elucidated the dramatic transitions that occurred throughout the history of Korean ceramics. According to him, the 15th and 16th century practice of Buncheong is critically important for an overall understanding of Korean pottery. Later Korean works, celadons and porcelains, find themselves heavily influenced by Chinese aesthetics and techniques. However, Buncheong wares encompass a separate visual landscape from Chinese wares, and are often considered folk pottery, a ceramic tradition relatively uninfluenced by international pressures.

“The basic technique of Buncheong wares is taking a grey stoneware, [a clay body] adding a coating of white slip, [a clay and water mixture] which is manipulated for decorative effect,” Mowry says, “whether stamping it, putting white slip into stamped intaglio designs, coating with white slip and incising or carving inside or coating with white slip and painting on the surface with dark slip.” Each facet of these techniques has a historical root—each Korean historical process that Mowry explains contributes to the ultimate form that Buncheong works take and Wagner’s works complicate. Part of what makes Wagner’s work important, according to Mowry, is that it introduced American audiences to a ceramic style that is a representation of Korean aesthetic thought, in contrast to later Korean ceramic styles, that blur the lines between the region’s pottery and that of China.

According to Wagner, the freedom of working with a medium with great diversity in form and decoration has encouraged her personal expression. “I want to be free and wild,” she says at the exhibition opening on Saturday. Many of her pieces feature fish—a traditional motif in Buncheong works that represents affluence or abundance—but Wagner used them to whimsical rather than symbolic effects. “My fish don’t have names; they’re just fish,” Wagner says.

According to Mowry, some of the most fascinating moments in her career take place when she subtly breaks from the Buncheong framework. “She imbues her wares with a distinctly personal touch that marks them as contemporary and that reveals her genius as a potter.” Mowry says.