By Andrew Hamlin
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY
Photo courtesy: Office of the Consulate General of the Republic of Korea in Seattle
The Korean concept of “meot,” pronounced approximately “mot,” proves difficult to translate into English. Hyonjeong Kim Han, curator of the new exhibit “Meot: Korean Art from the Frank Bayley Collection” at the Seattle Asian Art Museum, admitted as much.
“Meot,” said Han at the exhibit’s press preview, can convey such concepts as “beauty, style, [and] refined sensibilities.” It can apply to nature, but also to art.
One thing Han said with certainty, though: Frank Bayley had, and his collection embodies, the spirit of “meot” all the way.
Frank Sawyer Bayley III (1939-2022), traveled extensively in South Korea and made his home in San Francisco, but he was born and raised in Seattle, where he attended the prestigious Lakeside School.
He was born into one of our cities’ most prestigious families. A great-great-grandfather, Frank Collins, served as one of Seattle’s early mayors. Bayley’s maternal grandmother, Emma Baillargeon Stimson, served on the Seattle Art Museum’s Board of Directors, and helped SAM build its extensive holdings.
The “Meot” exhibit contains several distinct sections and several different contemporary South Korea / Republic of Korea artists—each referred to along guidelines of Revised Romanization of Korean, approved in 2000 by South Korea’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism.
Album Leaf (landscape with a man sitting under a tree)_late 19th century. Image from SAM Communications (Seattle Art Museum)
Yoon Kwang-cho spent years as a Buddhist monk, before leaving the religious order to focus on pottery. He studied traditional buncheong stoneware—a style popular between the 14th and 16th centuries—but eventually, according to Han, “threw away his potter’s wheel,” and found “his own way of contemporizing white clay,” based on his Buddhist spirituality.
The exhibit features two female artists, which, said Han, is still quite rare in Korean folk arts. “Traditionally it’s only father-son.” But Kim Yik-yung studied in the U.S. and fell under the spell of British potter Bernard Leach. This allowed her to “throw away the textbooks,” as Han put it, and pioneer new approaches to ceramic textures and cutting techniques.
The other female, Youngsook Park, specializes in moon jars, a kind of traditional Korean porcelain producing a wide, thick, and sturdy jar shaped roughly like a full moon. The ceramic process involves firing two hemispherical halves which are then joined at the middle. No two come out perfectly spherical and no two come out alike—a feature much respected during the moon jar’s inception in the Joseon dynasty (1392-1897).
Moon Jar_2007. Photo from SAM Communications (Seattle Art Museum)
Bohnchang Koo, a photographer, was a close friend of Frank Bayley. He specializes in inkjet pigment prints, several of which can be seen in “Meot.” But he also furnished the portrait of Bayley sitting at the center of the exhibit.
Son Manjin, the exhibit’s only calligrapher, studied traditional Chinese calligraphy, but branched off into creating his own scripts, conveying power, passion, and motion, through his own methodologies.
The exhibit also includes quite a few historical pieces of tea ware, serving ware, common household objects such as ink grinders, and paintings. Han stressed the comparisons and contrasts between the old and the new, calling attention to the traditional methods of ceramics including the elaborate inlay procedures, sometimes still used today, which date to the 13th century.
Bottle_15th-16th century. Photo from SAM Communications (Seattle Art Museum)
She also called attention to the historically-popular mountings for paintings, which for a long time in Korea followed Japanese and Chinese examples—with the result that relatively few period paintings feature authentically Korean-style mountings.
The Japanese influence, she stressed, works “more like a balance, between painting and presentation.” The Korean tradition dials down fancy presentations, letting the artwork speak for itself.
“Meot: Korean Art from the Frank Bayley Collection” runs through March 2, 2025, at the Seattle Asian Art Museum, 1400 East Prospect Street at Volunteer Park.
For prices, times, and other information, visit seattleartmuseum.org/whats-on/exhibitions/meot .