Beware of preconceptions. Wearing St Clair Scents‘ Gardener’s Glove I expected gardens and got a trip to a museum instead. Three encounters at one museum: with medieval celadon, with the abstract minimalism of Dansaekhwa, and a cluster of steampunk arborists.

1. I usually walk past the porcelain in museums, the over-decorated best china leaves me cold. But not here. I was transfixed by the pale green glow, lit so the pieces hover in cool dark space. It’s work I want to touch, feel the balance, move my hands across them to know the maker’s pleasure in making such elegant shapes from unformed clay, run the pads of my fingers over the incised designs. I have small fantasies about museum heists.

2. Breathless, heart-stopped in a room of Dansaekhwa work, the Korean minimalist art movement. Chung Chang-Sup working obsessively, incrementally with tak (mulberry paper bark fibres), soaking, pulping, kneading, surrendering his will to follow the materials. Kwon Young-woo painting and constructing delicate, almost botanical, cellular structures with meok (the thick Korean calligraphy ink) and handmade hanji papers. Falling into the huge pieces that cherish their materiality, navigating the upheavals of dangerous politics by meshing the traditional with the shockingly avant-garde. They smell wonderful.

3. The arborists were behind the museum. In heavy canvas overalls, thick leather gloves, and insectoid face-masks, they were dripping sweat in the raw sun while moving heavy trees with infinite care.  Their hands supporting, patting, soothing each tree breathing for us in the thick, terrible air as the city keeps growing, their hands wrapping each trunk with coats of hand-woven reeds, split bamboo, and twine for protection against the heavy chains.

The Leeum in Seoul seems a long way from rural Vermont, but they connect for me through this skilled, loving, obsessive work. It’s about breath, and hands, and materiality.  Shaping the natural world, and shaping your self through that connection. Weaving links between the made and the grown, valuing deep time built moment by moment with the rituals of day-by-day work stretching across decades, millennia.

originally posted 4 August 2025