A Woodworker and a Ceramicist Are Turning a Seoul Gallery Into a Scholar's Study
The fifth Yeol x Chanel craft exhibition pairs a joinery master working with 800-year-old wood against a ceramicist who builds by hand rather than on a wheel, inside a space built to feel like a study room rather than a showcase.
Ceramic artist Baek Gyeong-won seated and woodworker Jo Bok-rae standing beside a handmade wooden desk and shelf displaying a ceramic vase
Seoul's Yeol Bukchon Gallery is spending the next two months as something closer to a scholar's study than a conventional gallery floor, the fifth installment of an annual craft exhibition run jointly by the Yeol Foundation and Chanel. Where past editions have leaned on display cases and didactic wall text, this one is built around a single idea: strip a room down to a desk, a shelf, a vessel, and let the material carry the argument instead of the labeling.
The two makers anchoring the show work in almost opposite registers. Jo Bok-rae, named the exhibition's Craftsman of the Year, builds furniture through somok, the traditional joinery method that holds wood together without a single nail. He trained under masters in Jinju before developing his own practice, and the wood itself is often the real subject of his pieces — a zelkova beam pushing 800 years old, marked with the mottled 'bird's egg' grain that only forms over centuries, or timber pulled from wood that spent a millennium submerged. His stated principle is blunt: the parts no one will ever see should be finished exactly as carefully as the parts everyone will.
Baek Gyeong-won, honored as Young Craftsperson of the Year, works in the opposite direction — toward something newer rather than older. She builds ceramics by hand-coiling and stacking clay rather than throwing it on a wheel, a slower method that leaves visible evidence of the hand in the finished surface. For this show she's introduced a chamotte inlay technique paired with a glaze she developed herself, aiming for surfaces that read less like traditional pottery and more like compressed landscape.
Creative director Yang Tae-o, now five years into shaping this collaboration, has framed the installation around the idea of a scholar's study room reimagined rather than reconstructed — the classical Korean interior's restraint borrowed as a structure, not a costume. The show runs at Yeol Bukchon Gallery in Seoul through October 16.
