Medieval World
The Goryeo Celadon Potters (1100–1250)
Korean Goryeo Celadon sculptors.
The Goryeo celadon potters are not one named master but the court and temple kilns of the Goryeo kingdom — especially the twelfth-century kilns of Gangjin and Buan — that made the jade-green stoneware later ages would treat as Korea's classic ceramic. The dates here bracket the high celadon century, about 1100 to 1250, when the court at Kaesong demanded maebyeong vases, ewers, and incense burners whose glaze was compared to jade. The potters themselves are unnamed; the ware is the author.
The body is high-fired stoneware. The glaze is an iron-bearing celadon reduced in the kiln to gray-green or kingfisher blue. Sanggam inlay — designs cut into the leather-hard body, filled with white or black slip, then glazed — is the Goryeo invention that lets cranes, clouds, and chrysanthemums float inside the green. Sculptural pieces (a duck on a lotus incense burner, a fish-dragon ewer) show the same glaze over modeled form.
Itoh Ikutaro's catalogs of the Museum of Oriental Ceramics, Osaka (the Ataka collection) and the National Museum of Korea's celadon exhibitions are the standard modern accounts. Chinese Yue and Ru wares are the acknowledged ancestors; the sanggam surface and the Buddhist ritual shapes are Goryeo's own.
The words the record keeps using: jade, cool, refined, inlaid, watery, courtly.
At a glance
- Lived 1100–1250
- Origin Korean (Goryeo)
- Worked in Kaesong (Goryeo capital)
- Era Medieval World
- Movements Goryeo Celadon
- Mediums Celadon stoneware
- Techniques Celadon glazing and sanggam
Works in the archive
- Goryeo Celadon Maebyeong, 1150 (Gansong Art Museum, Seoul (National Treasure 68))
The famous inlaid maebyeong (plum vase), National Treasure 68: a swelling shoulder, a small mouth, and cranes and clouds in sanggam under a kingfisher glaze. Catalogs treat it as the type of… - Celadon Incense Burner with Lotus and Duck, 1150 (National Museum of Korea, Seoul)
A twelfth-century incense burner: an openwork lotus bowl and a lid modeled as a duck (or water bird) among leaves. It is a Buddhist ritual shape under the same celadon glaze as the court vases — sculpture and pot at… - Celadon Fish-Dragon Ewer, 1150 (National Museum of Korea, Seoul (National Treasure 61))
A ewer modeled as a fish-dragon (eoryong), National Treasure 61: spout, handle, and scaled body under a single celadon glaze. Itoh and the National Museum present it as the sculptural extreme of Goryeo court ware — a…
What was said
Itoh's catalogs of Korean ceramics from the Museum of Oriental Ceramics, Osaka, present Goryeo celadon as a court ware whose jade glaze and sanggam inlay are the measure of the tradition — maebyeong, ewers, and ritual shapes from the Ataka collection and related pieces.
Sanggam — designs incised in the leather-hard body, filled with white or black slip, then covered with a reduced iron glaze — is the Goryeo technique that lets cranes, clouds, and floral scrolls read through the celadon as inlaid drawing.
National Museum of Korea catalogs, in the line of Choi Sun-u's surveys of Korean art, treat the twelfth-century sculptural celadons — incense burners and animal ewers — as Buddhist ritual ware at the same technical height as the inlaid maebyeong.
What would The Goryeo Celadon Potters make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after The Goryeo Celadon Potters", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with The Goryeo Celadon Potters · Keep a life moment the way The Goryeo Celadon Potters would · Pictures made after The Goryeo Celadon Potters