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The Influence of Korea upon Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada

In rural areas the contradictions are even more commonplace. As peasant farmers in traditional dress tend the rice paddies they create a timeless image apparently no different to some of Leach's observations and drawings executed at the time of his visits. Korea is a beautiful country, the Koreans a relaxed, polite- without the rigid formality of the Japanese and extremely generous people. My stays in Korea have been largely centred around the Keryon national Park a few miles to the west of the city of Taejon approximately 2 hours south of Seoul. Korea is a mountainous country and the pointed, craggy peaks are covered in dense forest inhabited by vicious mosquitoes. Keryonsan is a place just like this but is also a place of deep spiritual importance to Buddhist Koreans and there are a number of ancient wooden temples staffed by jolly, shaven headed monks of both genders dressed in grey tunics. Keryon Mountain is also a place traditionally associated with punchong pottery in the 15th and 16th centuries and the kiln sites exist with their abundant 400 year old shards still littering the ground. In the country areas one can still find the multi chambered kilns of the Ongii potters. Ongii is the tradition of earthy, country made pottery typified by a dark clay body, treacle coloured glaze ( a mixture of body clay and wood ash) often decorated with bold, deftly made finger sweeps through the wet glaze. In this place it easy to sympathise with Leach's description of Korea as a place of 'unique beauty'. As I mentioned Leach first visited Korea in 1918 with the scholar and academic Soetsu Yanagi his friend and in many ways his mentor, whom he had first met in 1910. In his memoirs 'Beyond East and West' Leach writes in 1978 with a passionate affection for Korea, of its landscape and its people…'The emotions were poetic; I did not want to leave; memories are still nostalgic.' …Indeed, the beauty that he found in all things Korean were to have a profound effect upon him throughout his life. He visited again in 1935 also with Yanagi and it was Yanagi's profound enthusiasm for Korean 'handicrafts' that so impressed both Leach and Hamada However, it was more than just the objects themselves that made such an impact. Yanagi recounts in the 'Unknown Craftsmen' an incident that happened to him while in Korea…. He was visiting the workshop of a wood turner. To his surprise the material being used was still green and totally unseasoned. So he asked the maker…'Why do you use such green material? Cracks will come out pretty soon!' ' What does it matter' was the answer. 'How can you use something that leaks?' he asked ' Just mend it' came the reply. He goes on…'With amazement I discovered that they mend them so artistically and beautifully that the cracked piece seems better than the perfect one….At that very moment when I got that unexpected answer I came to understand for the first time the mystery of the asymmetrical nature of Korean lathe work…he concludes 'so this asymmetry is but a natural outcome of their state of mind and not the result of conscious choice. The deformation of their work is the natural result of nonchalance…they make what they make without any pretension.' These somewhat generalist understandings or perceptions of a national characteristic is typical of the Edwardian middle class academic whether English or Japanese and could be seen as patronising in the extreme. To a young, urbane and urban intellectual such as Yanagi even rural Japan was largely uncharted territory. So, to both him and particularly Leach the village life of the Korean potter must have seemed very exotic indeed. Nevertheless, both Leach and Yanagi firmly believed, perhaps naively, that the characteristics they admired in Korean pottery to be the product of a national personality trait and that fact is quite important as it explains the fascination with all things Korean and not just the pottery. It is indeed true that the pots do display an unconscious freedom born out of the desire to carve out a meagre living that is in common with 'country' pottery from many parts of the world including our own slip-wares which, for all the same reasons, also profoundly influenced both potters. It was the very instinctive, unfussy, non-intellectual approach of these peasant potters that so appealed, ironically, to this intellectual group who, following Yanagi's lead revelled in the irregular. In Korean pots particularly those of the 15th century onward, Punch'ong and the later porcelains of the Choson period, they sensed that the overall spirit of the pot was far more important than any individual element from which it is made. Thus imperfection was of little matter, indeed imperfection and asymmetry enhanced rather than detracted from a pots vigour and charm. Yanagi wrote in 1954…. ' If one visits a Korean country pottery, the mystery attached to the beauty of imperfection in the pots is solved; the whole process of throwing, turning, glazing and firing partakes of [an] easy going naturalness, rough perhaps, but beautiful and imperfect. The making of these pots is very free - but not consciously free - and full to the brim with natural good taste.' All of this must have been music to the ears of Bernard leach who subscribed to much of what William Morris had to say on the subject of mechanisation and industrialisation of the crafts…Morris wrote in defence of the hand worker and in this context could easily have been talking about Korean pottery,…'that we must not demand excessive neatness in pottery and this more especially in cheap wares'. Through imperfection there is warmth - through nonchalance there is freedom. These qualities are more than recognition of the quaint or the charming -they are the foundation for an ethos. Again, this time in 1975 discussing the beauty inherent in irregularity and asymmetry, Bernard wrote…It is [beauty that is] the liberation of the free spirit of man in work…Of the worlds pots I would choose the Koreans above all….they were people doing work as well as they knew how and getting as much satisfaction as a man could.' And that is my point - we are talking not about an individual pot here or another there, to be copied or imitated. We are talking about a whole package - a way of working that neither man was able to follow as they might have wished, they couldn't - they were artist craftsmen not artisans, they were thinkers as well as doers, they were of the 20th century and not the 15th or 17th - their egos did get in the way, of course they did but It didn't stop them trying and it didn't stop them adopting a style of working that at least imitated the Korean way in Leach's case and in Hamada's, simply because of the greater output, was as close to the unconscious as one could be given the restraints of epoch and reward.