Episode 69: Yee Sookyung’s Translated Vase (2011)

 If you’re a proud old like me, then I’m sure you know that this is Billy Joel’s You May Be Right, and you love it like I do. He’s been my musical hero since I was literally in diapers, and this song a straight up banger. And it’s in no small part because of that opening. That thrill of shattering glass. This song is the lead-off track on the album Glass Houses, appropriately enough, and man, that glass. Here, let’s listen to it again. And again! (shudder). It’s such a rebellious sound. What is more jarring, and anxiety-inducing, and satisfying, and irreparable, than that sound? It kills me. I was so never the kid who could shatter glass like this. I’m not a 1980s Billy Joel rebel wannabe. And more than that, I can’t deal with permanent, irrevocable loss.

Because broken shards can’t be repaired. This isn’t like gluing the handle back on a mug. Once you drop that dish, it’s off to get your shoes and then the dustpan. Straight into the trash. No one would think to try to mend it back together, because that original form is just gone. Even if there’s incredible monetary or sentimental value, it’s gone. Why even bother trying to piece shattered pieces back together? But there are some people, some artists, who see this kind of loss as an opportunity. It’s a chance to move forward, to make something else. Something new. Fish those shards out of the trash and make some treasure.

This is the mindset you should bring with you when you approach the Korean artist Yee Sook Yung’s translated vase. Yee is just this kind of innovative, forward-thinking artist. And yes, this object is billed as a vase, but it sits like a squat little figure, a little buddy, bulbous and gelatinous and as calm and settled as a Buddha. It appears squishy as the Michelin man, yet it’s obviously hard as rock, and seamed with gleaming 24 karat gold. It’s like I imagine Yee’s brain to be: weird, wonderful, and wholly original.

Yee started the series of Translated Vases in 2002. She describes them as a ceramic practice that benefits from “productive failure,” that is, taking a failure, specifically the broken, discarded shards from Korean artisans who replicate historical vases and vessels from the Goryeo and Joseon  dynasties, and turning that failure on its ear – and making them an artistic success by reassembling them like a jigsaw puzzle that only she knows, and creating these new, organic, biomorphic forms. She then fuses together the shards with gold leaf, which, although she denies the connection, is similar to another Korean practice called kintsugi – repairing broken pottery through an opulent bit of suchering with urushi lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold. Some of the translated vases are huge, larger than the visitor, and others, like this one at the MFA Boston, is more modest, more little-buddy-sized. More than anything, though, her work highlights, simultaneously, the fragility of these objects and their indestructability. Moreover, she emphasizes the inevitable imperfections that come from anything made by a human hand. And she points out our human inability to ever reproduce the past, or construct historical continuity – because, let’s face it, reconstructing the past is as impossible as piecing the shards of a dropped vase back together again perfectly. And yet, above all, she is quick to remind us, through her work, that the Korean word “geum” translates as both “crack” and “gold” – helping us to reimagine what failure, destruction, and renewal can all mean, if we’re open to the new.

And when you come upon this quirky little object in a gallery of Korean sculpture at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the first thing you’re hit with is this idea of historical continuity, of reinterpreting the past for the present. The Korean gallery is part of a larger series of galleries that house Asian art, which is part of a larger series of galleries that, not to put too fine a point on it, feel kind of ancient irrelevant and in the way when you’re just trying to navigate the maze of this museum to get to the Monets. Pots and vases and bowls are a different kind of art than Modernists splashing a canvas with their emotional guts. They’re not just objects meant to decorate or tell stories, but to be used. And so they can feel kind of utilitarian and dusty, simultaneously too old to bother with and not nearly as old as they actually are. And non-Western pots and vases and bowls aren’t just dusty but foreign, so even one more step removed – you don’t even necessarily know the story they’re supposed to be telling. And that’s what makes the interaction with this object so surprisingly interesting. In the words of The Dude, Yee’s translated vase really ties the room together. You’re surrounded by ancient examples of the very fragments that this sculpture repurposes, and, like any good historian, it’s both telling their stories and illustrating the impossibility of ever telling their stories.

Okay. We’ve just touched on a lot. Almost like this vase of an episode has been blown into a bunch of shattered ideas that we get to take upon ourselves to piece together. You know, almost. So let’s take each shard one at a time. And we’ll start, appropriately enough, with the physical shards themselves, which Yee herself describes as her starting point. These fragments are, as I’ve said, from the broken reproductions of old Korean ceramics. This porcelain, at its most primal state, is just sand and water, fired into a hard vessel, but to Yee, even something so simple is “extremely stressful” when it sits in its unbroken state, like a little pressure cooker ready to blow. It needs to be broken, she says. It needs to be separated from its original function and perfection, to be, in her words, “released from the stress and danger of being damaged.” It’s like it needs to break to release the pressure of being perfect. And nutty as this sounds, I think we can all relate to this – it’s like that new car that needs its first scratch to release the anxiety we have of you know, it getting scratched. And then Yee takes it further, adding that breaking the object also “releases [it] from the stress of being a reproduction.” And I love this idea too, that a reproduction of something carries its own stress, like it could buckle at any point from the pressure of living up to the original. So she preempts that buckle by… smashing it herself.

But there’s another layer to this, which is that she witnessed these pots getting smashed already. Yee was first introduced to these ceramics because she saw a master ceramicist who specialized in Korean reproductions break almost all of his own vases himself when he spotted even the smallest defect. It’s like these vases are too beautiful to live in our messy human world. It’s like there’s no place for this kind of utopian perfection, the pressure of connoisseurship. And in that way, it almost makes sense to turn them from a pristine vase into a biomorphic little buddy, to celebrate them as almost human, with all our foibles. “I am attracted to failed, broken, or ephemeral things,” Yee writes. “It is not about fixing or mending, but about celebrating the vulnerability of the object and ultimately myself.”

This way of thinking has deep roots in East Asian art. The contrast between revering something valuable and fragile and equally revering its breakability, its humanness, its flaws – sits at the intersection of Japanese and Chinese art, which we explored in episode 53. In fact, let’s recap by playing a short clip from that episode – I’ll let myself take it from here. The relationship between Chinese and Japanese art…

“…in particular becomes apparent, most notably in the way that they seem stylistically opposed and yet are still politically and culturally interdependent, and I’ll explain what this means. You might notice that Chinese and Japanese art are strikingly opposite. Chinese art is more commonly associated with serious-minded connoisseurship, with fine, luxurious wares – picture, for example, the brilliant, lustrous porcelain finish on a priceless Ming vase. Japanese art, meanwhile, tended to embrace a more rustic asymmetry and sense of playfulness and irreverence; it’s less art of aspiration and perfection than of the human scale, of our human flaws. 

And we can see this juxtaposition play out in the Japanese tea ceremony, which is, on its face, purely Japanese. The tea ceremony was an artistic and cultural manifestation of Zen Buddhism, which arose in the Muromachi period of the 15th century, and a teacup that would be used in the ceremony might be fired to appear unfinished, rustic and misshapen, yet sits perfectly in our imperfect hands, with a dent right where our thumb would naturally go. Very Japanese.”

Okay, we’re back to the present. Which is appropriate, because this is exactly where Yee lives. And we can think about this, spiritually, in terms of the Buddhism I just talked about – she describes herself as both Buddhist and Christian, although with no particular affiliation to either, or even religion in general. But she does talk about the Zen Buddhist space she enters when making her art, working slowly and repetitively in an enviable, intentional state of meditative flow that leaves itself open to new ideas in real time. You could really argue that the core of her beliefs is the present, what can be solidly made now, today, out of the past. Her response to the Japanese celebration of vulnerability, and the master potter destroying his pots, and her own release of these objects from the pressures of history, is to essentially make the new object bulletproof. With thick layers of epoxy, and metal structures inside the forms, she rebuilds them into objects that are, ironically, solid as a rock. In her words, “I translate these pieces to form an infinite proliferation which is no longer fragile…no longer vulnerable.”

So, I have two responses to this. The first is how this translated vase is displayed in the museum space: you’d never know how strong it is from the alarm system set up. It’s presented as though it’s as delicate, as fragile, as any of the other pristine ceramics in this gallery. And it isn’t. I mean, I’m sure it wouldn’t exactly benefit from being knocked off its white pedestal, but it’s always interesting to see how the way the museum space can present its art in a way that runs exactly counter to the art’s own aims and intentions. There’s nothing in its presentation that speaks to how resilient it is.

But that’s just an aside. More importantly, making this object, and the others in the series, so resilient, so intentionally anti-fragile, feels like she’s saying that fragility and resilience aren’t actually in tension with one another.  Maybe, instead, they’re a journey from one to the other. Putting broken vases back together is seen as unlucky or taboo in Korean culture, yet Yee chooses instead to turn this too on its ear. Again, to Yee, fragility and brokenness allow for rebirth and renewal; how else can a Korean artist, and a Korean national, who has experienced firsthand what it means to grow up in a culture of brokenness and fragmentation, make sense of the world in a productive way? And this is where her own biography matters. She’s 62 years old – she’s lived in the tension between North and South Korea her whole life. She was born in 1963, a decade after the end of the Korean war, and only two decades after the end of Japanese colonial rule and Japan’s attempt to push modernization in Korea at the expense of its past, including the intentional destruction and intentional preservation of Korean cultural artifacts – preservation, that is, in museums, of a destroyed cultural past, not unlike the few intentionally preserved Jewish cemeteries in Berlin. Look at the evidence of what we eradicated. Look at the presence of what we’ve made absent. History kept artificially alive under glass, and everything else destroyed.

And so, again, this destruction of the old is what allows for the new. The now. The present. It’s not a question of repair. You can’t glue the handle back on this mug. But it doesn’t mean you need to reach for the dustpan. There are new possibilities and opportunities to embrace, a continual chance for Yee, as an artist, to “intervene,” as she puts it. And her work is entirely about the present, the new, and not just in the abstract – these are new forms entirely, bulbous and biomorphic, with no gameplan other than to let the art guide her. She doesn’t set out with a specific intention for the forms of the vases, born, again, from “productive failure.” In fact, she describes how even the process of starting this series was a failure on her part – how, when she started out, she tried to create certain, intentional shapes with these discarded pieces, and realized how futile an effort it was. “I eventually learned that the pieces would guide me to the final form,” she writes. “Every day my work becomes more about discovering and less about reaching a destination.”

Still, though. Her final destination is pretty extraordinary. These sculptures are bubbles and globules of rock-hard determination. They refute the dustpan. They manage to do the impossible: to both embrace the thrill of the shatter and resist fragility. They are both frozen in time and a perfect rebuke of how history is written. They are simultaneously failure and triumph. They are the perfect response to the impossibility of perfection. Or, put another way, to paraphrase my parents’ musical hero, Leonard Cohen, there’s a crack in everything. It’s how the gold gets in.

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The Lonely Palette is written and produced by me, Tamar Avishai, with special thanks to roving correspondent Debbie Blicher.

To see all the images from this episode, and to find out everything else about the show, how to support it, sign up for our newsletter, become a patron, and more, go to thelonelypalette.com. You can also follow the show on Instagram @thelonelypalette – or you’ll be able to, once Instagram unlocks the account from the hackers who stole it from me – and reach out any time with ideas for upcoming shows. And we’ve got a brand new merch store! Sweatshirts, beanies, tote bags, mugs, all with fun new designs that proudly state you’re a niche art history nerd who supports small business. Check it out and the lonely palette.com/store.

The Lonely Palette is a proud founding member of Hub & Spoke, a fiercely independent collective of mind-expanding, thoughtful podcasts. And if you’re feeling a little, shall we say, uneasy about the state of our government, I have two recommendations for you: one is, and I’m not getting paid to say this, a deep dive into history and how bad it’s gotten, and how we’ve dug ourselves out, care of one of my favorite podcasts, The Rest is History. They’re not part of the Hub & Spoke collective, but lads, we’re happy to chat any time. But the other is the most recent episode of Wade Roush’s Soonish, where he put his despair aside to take some equally important top down and bottom up longer views: how we can adjust our thinking to the moment we’re in, and how we can embrace community to stay sane and active. Listen at soonishpodcast .org, Hub Spoke Audio.org, or wherever you get your podcasts. And my new baby and I will see you in a few weeks.