Bowl with White-slip Decorations (1600s): Art, History and Details

Bowl with White-slip Decorations (1600s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This type of wide-mouthed bowl was used every day in Korea, not exclusively for tea drinking. But when it was introduced to Japan around the early 1500s its imperfect appearance evoking the aesthetics of wabi-sabi caused it to be repurposed as a tea bowl. Korean tea bowls were circulated as a item of foreign luxury among Japanese military elites. It's highly possibly this type of bowl was produced in one of the kilns operated by the trading office Busan in Southern Gyeongsang province, and exported to Japan.

Object facts

• Title: Bowl with White-slip Decorations
• Date: 1600s
• Culture: Korea, Joseon dynasty (1392–1910)
• Type: Ceramic
• Technique: glazed ceramic
• Dimensions: Overall: 7.5 cm (2 15/16 in.)
• Collection: Korean Art
• Department: Korean Art
• Accession number: 1987.1076

A detail from the museum

This type of rustic tea bowl was highly appreciated among advanced Japanese practitioners of the tea ceremony.

Collection credit

Gift of Mary Pendell and Esther Berger in memory of Dr. and Mrs. Irving Ludlow

Further reading listed by the museum

• Jeong, Dong-ju. Joseon maksabal gwa ido dawan [조선 막사발과 이도다완]. Gyeonggi, Paju: Hangil ateu, 2012.
• Hur, Nam-lin. “Korean Tea Bowls (Kōrai Chawan) and Japanese Wabicha: A Story of Acculturation in Premodern Northeast Asia.” Korean Studies 39 (2015): 1–22.
• Heo, Hyun-Jung. "Resource Supply and Demand of Waegwanyo in the Late Joseon Dynasty [조선후기 왜관요의 자원 수급]." Hangdo busan no. 39 (2020): 205–239.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.