Moon Jar (#A31 246 230), 2023
Ceramic, porcelain slip, glaze // 72” x37” x42.” Photos Taken by Christopher Wormald.
Moon Jar (#A31 246 433), 2023 is an exaggerated feminine form. Orchids, adorn the blackened porcelain vessel and come off of it as if they are growths or appendages. Acting as scar tissue, the vines, and orchids are both armature and cage, the body becomes both wound and ornament, the body becomes reimagined chinoiserie.
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Throughout the five centuries of the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1897), Korea followed the neo-Confucian belief system. Plain white porcelain dominated the region’s ceramic production, and in the 18th century Moon jars anonymous white surface portrayed a sense of purity, while the decision to not decorate them showed restraint on the part of the artist, who resisted filling their surface with imagery. Because of this, they served the dual purpose of being ceremonial and utilitarian objects. Earlier jars have a compressed and more rounded opening at the top, while later ones have a straighter and higher mouth. Part of the appeal of their form came from this entirely handmade process, as it usually resulted in slight deviations from a perfectly circular shape.
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A-Number/Alien Registration Number/Alien Number (A-Number or A#): A unique seven-, eight- or nine-digit number assigned to a noncitizen by the Department of Homeland Security.
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"The tree-woman in Beloved is more than aesthetic congealment. Sethe’s tree is a monument to mortifying pain, but it is also a mobile ornamental structure, realizing the possibility of form in the aftermath of radical unmaking. From the divergence between black flesh and yellow ornament, we have arrived at this convergence: flesh that passes through objecthood needs ornament to get back to itself. The haunting in Beloved is the haunting of the history of racialized flesh, but it is also a history of ornamentalism. For mortified racialized flesh, ornamentalism points us to what it might take to reconceptualize personhood for persons who have been undone, challenging us to ask how to make discernible the peripheral, how to work the edges, how to enhance presence in the face of absence." Cheng, Anne Anlin. Ornamentalism.