Sunday 22nd October

Insadong is a wonderful area, full of galleries with varied work and I spent much of yesterday visiting some of the few contemporary craft galleries here and in an area West of where I am staying which was a bit like the Hampstead version of Seoul - hilly and lined with chi-chi shops with dressed up young Koreans and very lively - less touristy than Insadong which has the an air of Covent Garden.

Each of the gallery owners, once we had started talking, sat me down and offered me tea, Korean style. This was proper slowness - the careful preparation and personal selection of teabowls, pouring bowls and teapots, each very different according to the feel of the gallery and taste of the owner. One drinks three times from the bowl and it is a leisurely activity. I very much liked the way in which the objects chosen and used - all very considered - are mutually enhanced by their contents - it is a total and complete experience. It is also interesting to see contemporary ceramics stimulating this tradition - indeed there is a range of materials and disciplines represented - wood, lacquerware, ceramics and sometimes glass. The artist who runs the Tongin gallery who exhibited at Origin had this wonderful way (to me) of preparing the tea, which is very much a unconscious form of performance - with dextrous and fluid movements that were very natural. The table and space that it was served in was surrounded by collections of objects and things that she had made or inspire her.

My sense of this experience was reinforced through a wonderful book on tea given to me by the owner of the first gallery (one of my main experiences of Korea is the considerable kindness and generosity of people) which very much talks about ideas around slowness and the ritual of tea as a counterpoint to this. The book is also illustrated with the work of the main ceramicist exhibited in the gallery, whose work I photographed.

I later went to a beautiful tearoom in one of the old courtyard houses - a hanok - overlooking the mountains which edge Seoul. The owner proudly shows his collection of tea bowls and teawares in recessed shelving and there is something about this absolutely love and reverence for ceramics which would be rare in the UK but feels very natural in this environment, although it would be interesting to see how younger people respond considering this is one of the most wired nations on earth, and also given that coffee houses are all the rage. However through the sort of work that I have seen in Seoul, there has been a clearer consensus on common aesthetics which before then had been difficult to comprehend - certainly in the absence to me of any real design in terms of architecture or material goods - although in Seoul people are very fashionable and well dressed.

Through the guidebook I am staying in one of the oldest parts of the city, which also by chance for me is a short walk to Insadong. The guesthouse is an old house c. late 1900's, where much of the historic city generally has been destroyed by fire, development and war. This has been a wonderful experience and I shall be sad to leave it.

There are probably more craft galleries that one could see, but it is difficult to find information about them, and they are not always easy to find, if at all. They also typify the kind of research that Heather Rigg and I did for the international symposium this year, in that they only show Korean work and I'm unsure as to anywhere that sells Western work. The market for contemporary craft is small in Korea and the vast number of ceramics villages supply endless more traditional pieces which tends to undermine demand for new work. It was interesting thus to visit the Leeum Samsung Museum of Art, which is rather like the Prada of art galleries - absolutely beautiful, very reverention, acres of black and no postcards - one building of which is devoted to historic applied arts - ceramics, metalware, scroll painting - the counterbalance of the other building, designed by Jean Nouvel, with contemporary fine art, as if Korean applied art ended in the eighteenth century.

I will be adding photos to add more sense to this writing when I return - I gave up on working out how to do it....

Andy