Dancing on Temple Tops

Embroidery was the real reason for my trip to Korea. Delicate and tasteful, Korean embroidery is some of the most elegant in the world. It is said that in medieval times, one of the Korean rulers owed a debt to the Emperor of China and so as payment, the emperor demanded that the women most skilled in embroidery be gathered and sent to work at the Chinese court at Xian. With that, the debt was paid in full. And it was Korean embroiderers who brought sericulture and silk embroidery to the Japanese archipelago around 300 AD.

By the Choson period, Korean embroidery could be classified into two groups: Gung-su (royal court embroidery) and Min-su (folk embroidery). To supply the demands of royal court, Gung-su embroidery was produced in great variety to adorn large scale screens with grand images of pine trees and cranes, flowers and birds, and hundred-letter compositions featuring the symbols for longevity and happiness. Wooden furniture frequently had embroidered panels inset into cabinet doors, drawer facings and box lids. And the range of pouches is nothing short of amazing — incense pouches, writing brush pouches, spoon cases and a wide variety of women’s accessories.

The traditional dress of Korea is called the hanbok. For women, the basic hanbok features a high-waisted full skirt and a short jacket. An elaborate ceremonial version with an additional over-robe and headdress is shown at right, while a simpler yet beautifully elegant modern version of the hanbok is shown above. Both are richly embroidered.

Sadly (from my perspective), I could not find any second hand market for vintage hanbok. When these beautiful garments are worn out or out grown, they are simply recycled into gorgeous patchwork called pojagi. Traditionally these are used as dust covers or wrapping cloths, but now pojagi are highly valued by art collectors, who have frequently compared these textiles to compositions by European artists Paul Klee and Piet Mondrian. Two samples are shown below, but two samples can’t possibly do justice to the wide range of artistry that goes into these patchwork pieces.

The other form of Korean embroidery, Min-su was made for common people. Free from standardized rules, the works have a more whimsical naive quality and the bolder color schemes further add to its strength and charm. The introduction of woodblock printing for transferring designs allowed more rapid wide scale production of numerous small articles, even spools and thimbles were covered with small pieces of embroidered silk.

Shown below is a poster for a recent exhibition focused solely on traditional embroidered spools. Looking closely at the flat rectangular object in the lower left corner of the poster, you can see the coral silk thread wound between the yellow and crimson embroidered patches at either end of the spool.

In recent years, there has been greater interest in honoring Korea’s textile heritage. Several embroidery museums have been founded in Seoul. Indeed, Korean academics were the first to begin seriously investigating and documenting the histories of Asian embroideries. Dr. Yang Young Chung described the needle as a powerful tool that gave women the opportunity to improve their lives at a time when few opportunities existed for women. Using this tool, they enriched their lives. And as we encounter these remnants of their existence, our lives are also enriched.

On Sunday, the second day of our trip, we went to the studio of Brian Barry, a Buddhist Temple painter. I must admit that with all of the walking we had done the day before, my feet were still hurting all the way up to my bellybutton. So I was grateful that we hopped into a taxi for the journey across Seoul to Brian’s home and studio. It was a glorious fall day and the trees were flaunting their most perfect colors for us as we drove along the winding roads through some of the wealthiest and most scenic residential areas of northern Seoul.

It’s thought that Seoul’s earliest settlement may have been as long as 6,000 years ago and the geomancy of the mountains that ring the city were considered auspicious by the Chosun dynasty rulers, who chose the site as their capital. Modern Seoul has become home to over 10 million people, forcing an urban spread up the slopes of those surrounding mountains. Despite differences in the architecture and signs in a language I couldn’t read, the topography of our route reminded me of driving through parts of Marin county in California.

Brian’s studio is on the third floor of an apartment building nestled against a hillside that has been designated a national park. Thus on the one side he faces the immediate glories of the natural world and on the other the great urban sprawl, a perfect perch from which to reflect on cosmology in the modern world.

Initially, Brian came to Korea with the Peace Corps. In 1967, he was assigned to public health work, fighting TB in an underdeveloped country still reeling from the devastation of the Korean Civil war. As his love for the Korean people and culture grew, he stayed to study Buddhism, supporting himself as an interpreter. And decades later, one of those interpreting jobs for an American architect led him to focus on dancheong (colorful cosmic design patterns) painted on Korean temples.

Thereafter, Brian sought out Master Manbong (1910-2006), a dancheong specialist who had been designated transmitter of Important Intangible Cultural Property No. 48 of Korea, and then to this master artist, Brian expressed his ardent desire to learn Buddhist painting.

Although Master Manbong accepted this strange blue-eyed foreigner as one of his students, there was much doubt that a foreigner would ever be able to endure the hardships of the training regimen to learn the intricate skills of temple painting. Indeed, learning Buddhist painting proved to be extremely demanding, but Brian stuck it out for more than 20 years, continuing to learn from and serve Master Manbong until the Master’s death in 2006.

Over the years, Brian’s paintings have come to grace not only Korean temples, but also those in Thailand, Bangladesh, Russia and the U.S. His modern Buddhist paintings are also sold to private collectors. A fantastic story of an amazing life, you can read it in more detail by clicking on the link to his name above or by visiting Brian’s own site: www.bbbudart.com

And to glimpse the world of dancheong that has so inspired Brian Barry for 20 years, I offer below a small collection of images from Buddhist temples in Korea. Who could fail to be inspired by dancheong? I can foresee that even my humble sewing projects will have a future influence reflected in shades of teal and turquoise, richly punctuated by coral, gold and navy.

Last weekend I managed a brief getaway with three of my friends: Wendy Carroll from Australia, Kazuko Horiuchi from Chile and Judith Clancy, who was once upon a time from New Jersey. And our trip was indeed a delight. We flew off for a weekend in Seoul, South Korea.  Although I had been to the Korean port city of Pusan many many long years ago, I wasn’t really prepared for the melange of flavors and textures that greeted us on our arrival. We stayed at a traditional Korean inn called the Tea Guest House in the neighborhood of Insadong, which was a mix of traditional and modern buildings as shown by the images below. It was only an hour and a half flight from Osaka to Seoul, but there was a two-hour trip from Kyoto to the airport early in the day and a two-hour bus-ride from the airport in Seoul to our guest house in Insadong. So we were a pretty weary group of travelers by the time we checked into our lodgings. But we quickly found our way down the street to celebrate our arrival with a feast of Korean sea food at a restaurant that had been recommended by one of Judith’s many friends.

Seoul boasts of having the world’s best Wi-fi access and broadband connections with mind-boggling download speeds ranging up to 100Mbps, so it was amusing to see this young boy playing street-side video games in front of the local grocery store as we scouted out the city the next morning.

In the center of Seoul, there’s a branch of the Han River that had been paved over during the rush to modernize. But with the 21st century preference for green cities, a major reclamation project was initiated to tear down the elevated freeway and restore river as a sunken riverside park for city residents to enjoy.

We spent most of Saturday walking around Dongdaemun Market, one of the major shopping areas in Seoul. When we set out in the morning, we blithely started off to the gold district to buy earrings…and arrived to find block after block after block lined with stores selling every manner of gold adornment. And though we could have easily spent the day there playing with gold till our heart’s content, we decided to press on deeper into the heart of Seoul’s shopping district. Or rather I should say, one of Seoul’s shopping districts. We never made it to Namdaemun Market, Seoul’s other older shopping district.

We walked for hours. There was a lamp district, where all the stores sold lighting, and a plastics section, where you could buy anything made of plastic. Sheet metal fabrication shops were clustered in another area we walked through. An area that seemed to sell only towels for blocks and blocks. And bedding covered another area.

For lunch, we finally stopped to eat at one of the food vending stalls that line the edges of the street. And again, the variety was enormous. The stall in the foreground offered chestnuts: roasted, candied and batter fried. Other stalls offered noodles, tempura or sausages. Still other stands sold bags of traditional sweets made from puffed grains and/or nuts sweetened by honey. These were so reminiscent of granola that we wondered if Korea had provided the original inspiration when that cereal was introduced to America in the 1960s.

Then finally we came to crafts and fabric. Was I in heaven?

When there was lace, there was lace galore. And ditto with yarns and buttons and ribbons and tassels. Each bit of craft had it’s own area with more choices than I could possible sort through or savor over if I’d had a month of Sundays. All in all, Dongdaemun Market is comprised of 20 shopping malls (with fashion segmented by floors), 30,000 stores, and around 50,000 wholesalers. If you want it, they’ve got it.

Sadly though, there was not enough time to drink it all in. We had barely found the embroidery section when it was time to go. The time allotted to our shopping spree was over. At least for the moment anyway. Having discovered that such delight is so close, I’m sure I’ll go back again.

And that was only Saturday, but it is enough to fill one blog-post for tonight. I’ll have to write about Sunday later.

…there were a variety of games to play.  And since my wonderful computerized electronic whizball of a sewing machine had to be sent off for a week in a sewing machine hospital, I was forced spend the weekend trying to remember what I did before that lovely electronic toy entered my life.

Fortunately for me, there was a Genji exhibition at the Museum of Kyoto this week, celebrating the thousand year anniversary since The Tale of Genji was published by Lady Murasaki Shikibu, an 11th century aristocrat. Widely considered the world’s first novel, Genji is a classic of Japanese literature detailing courtly life in ancient Kyoto.For ten centuries The Tale of Genji has been a source of inspiration for the Japanese arts. Bugaku dance and Noh performances have re-enacted the life of Prince Genji, while the games and pastimes described in the story were adapted and expanded to reflect the novel. The playing pieces for the 19th century board game shown at right were painted to represent all the main characters from Genji. The center panel of the woodblock print above shows the same game being enjoyed by a cluster of noblewomen.

Likewise, the kaiawase clam shell matching game with its hexagonal storage box were delicately painted with scenes from the novel. Kaiawase matching is an ancient game, but quite similar to the card game “concentration”. Pairs of cleaned and polished clam shells are painted with matching images, then multiple sets of clam shells are collected to form a complete game set. To play, the clam shells are placed painted side down and the players take turns trying to find and match the identical pairs. Though I’ve never had a chance to play the game itself, I’ve always been fascinated by the elaborately detailed imagery painted on the shells and storage cases.

And of course, there is manga. Reading manga has always been one of the quintessential forms of Japanese entertainment. The books shown here are examples of a 19th century retelling of Genji. Never having been stigmatized as “mind-rot”, the way western comic books have been, manga have always enjoyed an appreciative audience in Japan. In an earlier time, they were simply called e-hon (picture books) and attracted some of the brightest artistic stars of the day.

There were, of course, vastly more games on display in the exhibition, involving skills as diverse as incense sniffing and poetry reciting — far too many of course for a simple blog entry to recount. But it seemed as though in a simpler world, the goal was to find ways to delight each of the senses rather than just to kill time.

I’ve had little time to keep up with my blogging, but at least I have finally been able to begin posting my lovely little collection of haori jackets for sale in my kimono shop. The first five were just listed, so do click the “Buy Vintage Kimono” on the menu above to drop by to take a look. They would make wonderful holiday gifts for yourself or anyone else.  I’ll try to add a few more every couple of days until I’ve gotten my entire stock listed.

Under the gorgeous full moon a few nights ago, my friend Judith Clancy and I attended a gagaku concert in the garden surrounding Shimogamo shrine. Areas of the garden were lit with flood-lamps, which guided our way as we walked through the large gardens toward the stage outside one of the main buildings of the shrine. Though the autumn nights are definitely getting cooler, it was still lovely to join the audience clustered before the open air stage. Many in the audience had also attended Tea Ceremony before the concert and were still dressed in kimono.

Gagaku is the oldest form of classical music in Japan, having been brought to Japan from China in the 7th century A.D., a time when Japan was busily assimilating extensive amounts of Chinese cultural and political practices. The word gagaku translates as “elegant music” and is played by an ensemble of 3 percussion instruments and 3 wind instruments. As the tradition developed in Japan, gagaku was performed by hereditary guilds of musicians and even today many members of the Imperial Palace Music Department are descendants of the old guilds.

Gagaku is often accompanied by a classical dance called bugaku. And of course, the spectacular costumes worn by both the muscians and dancers, as well as the draperies gracing the stage, added a visual treat to the evening’s entertainment.

The beautiful red O-higan-bana are blooming in the gardens of Shokukuji temple near my house. Known as “red spider lilies” in English, O-higan-bana translates literally as “the equinox flower” since it blooms suddenly but briefly, around the time of the Fall Equinox in late September. They spring up almost overnight in clumps and clusters throughout temple gardens and along the narrow paths through rice fields, a last showy gasp of fiery flowering color before the full onset of autumn.

The equinoxes, both of them — spring and summer, are national holidays in Japan. So Tuesday was a day off my normal work schedule and a chance to do a bit of catching up. Which means it was finally time to unbundle those bundles of haori that I bought a few weeks ago and prepare them to be posted on the Vintage Kimono section of my website. That involves quite a bit of work behind the scenes, so I was really grateful for the help of Wendy Carroll, good friend and dear heart, for spending part of her holiday helping me get started with the measuring and cataloging that needs to be done.

With a friend to help the task speed along, each colorful piece of this jumbled bundle was tagged and measured by the end of the day. Next comes the photography, trying to show the color, the details and making sure to identify any flaws. But making pictures of garments on a homemade scarecrow appealing must require a special talent, and thus far such talent has eluded me. But I will keep trying and soon, I hope, these lovely little kimono jackets will be listed for sale.

Gaijin is the word used to describe foreigners in Japan. Literally translated, the word simply means “outsider”, but can be loaded with undertones depending on the attitude of the speaker. And just as in every other country, Japanese attitudes toward foreign immigrants run the political spectrum from conservative to liberal.

Often our unfamiliarity with Japanese customs sometimes leaves people annoyed or shocked and sometimes just amused. But there is also curiosity: Why did we foreigners come here? Why do we stay? What do we like about our lives in Japan? And to address those questions, local television shows sometimes like to interview “an interesting gaijin“.

So all of that gives a little background of how I wound up taping a segment for Japanese TV this week. The show will air in mid-October, but the taping took place at my house yesterday afternoon.  Shown above are Hiroko Hayashi, who translated for me and the director, Takashi Matsushita as they prepared to begin taping. I admit to being quite nervous at the start but both Hiroko-san and Takashi-san were such wonderfully charming and delightful people that I soon relaxed. Sharing my love for Kyoto and talking about how much I have learned from Japanese design made conversation easy.

Computer embroidery is a highly developed commercial industry in Japan, but home embroidery machines don’t seem to be as popular here as they are in other countries. Perhaps that’s why the producers found my efforts to digitize so surprising. As he left, the director said he thought it was one of the better segments he had filmed and promised to send me a DVD of the finished segment. So I suppose in a few weeks, I’ll see how it turned out.

It’s been so hectic these last few weeks that I’ve barely had time to breathe, let alone open my beautiful bundles of haori that have patiently waited for my attention for almost two weeks now. But hectic as its been, I still squeezed in the time to enjoy the Kazari exhibition at Kyoto City Museum before the show closes.

Kazari is a Japanese word meaning “adornment” and this exhibition was devoted to the history of the Japanese penchant for adorning object surfaces with beautiful and intricate designs and then arranging those objects to adorn public and private spaces. The world of Japanese design is so often renowned for it’s brilliant minimalism and yet intricate elaborations of surface design also play a strong role as shown by the items selected for inclusion in this exhibition.

The elaborate Jomon pottery shown at left dates back some 10,000 years to the earliest hunter-gathering societies of pre-historic Japan. Although its peaked and coiled form may defy practicality and its uses remain uncertain, this vessel is but one of the hundreds of such archeological finds from that era.

In contrast, the Arita porcelain jar shown at right was produced several millenia later in the 18th century Edo period, yet it reflects an equal penchant for elaboration. In this case, however, the form has been simplified while intricately painted glazes provide the design interest.

With dozens of examples in each category, there is of course no way to reprise the entire exhibition for you here on my little blog — pottery and porcelain, saddles, swords and armor, lacquered boxes, hair ornaments and altar pieces, each decorated exquisitely with painstaking attention to the finest detail. But of course, my favorite pieces in any show are always the textiles. Below are a few of the exquisite little embroidered pouches. The two sets shown immediately below feature bamboo and chrysanthemum designs, respectively, would have been used by a man to carry his tobacco and pipe in elegance and style.

The purse at right might have been carried to Tea ceremony. Notice the the tiny carved bird that forms the clasp in perfect complement to the embroidered swallow.

And of course, kimono. With so many many many gorgeous examples it was hard to choose a favorite. This one from the early 20th century features birds among bamboo in the snow, dyed and accented with embroidery.

But the intent of this exhibition was more than simply a display of beautiful relics. Rather, the emphasis lay on the transformative nature of Kazari. In the preface to the catalog, the curator writes, “We are delighted to be able to present to you the timeless world of kazari, where functionality, beauty, the sacred and the secular collide to form an unexpected unity. The act of kazaru (adorning) momentarily lifts one’s spirits from the everyday realm. Efforts to adorn (kazaru) have at times revealed a surprising disregard for practicality but have proven to be a profound motivating force in Japanese culture.”

And even though I had an insufficient amount of time to spend surrounded by such beauty, I went away uplifted.

Sunday was a wonderful day spent in my favorite way — pawing through colorful silks, inspecting and selecting vintage kimono at my dealer’s warehouse. At right you see my bundles of purchases, wrapped in the traditional way in extra large squares of fabric called furoshiki. (So much more charming than a shopping bag!) You can see one of my purchases in bright turquoise silk peaking out of the top of one of the bundles.

Sunday’s shopping spree focused on a particular part of a kimono ensemble,haori. These are kimono jackets or coats. Haori can be made of silk, silk cotton blend, or wool and feature patterns that are just as lovely as those on kimono themselves. But since haori are jackets, they are much shorter — ranging from hip to knee length — and they look great with western clothes. Awhile back, I gave a lovely haori to a girlfriend in San Francisco and heard that she paired it with black silk trousers to make an absolutely glorious outfit that she wears to the opera.

Sadly though, this is Monday morning and I must trot off to work. My bundles must remain bundled till later in the week when I can begin cataloging and photographing them to post on my vintage kimono site. As I start to post my new acquisitions for sale, I’ll e-mail notices to those who have requested it. If you’d like to be on that mailing list, click on the “Buy Vintage Kimono” link on the menu bar above, then click the link on the kimono page to sign up for e-mail notices. You’ll be among the first to know when these treasures go up for sale.