Kang Chang Eoun 강장연

As a ceramic artist it must be getting a bit lonely for Kang Chang Euon. Where once 80% of the population of his neighborhood on the east end of the island of Jeju were involved in ceramic production, now he is almost the only person under the age of 70 left in the field. He runs the Jeju Ceramic Center which fires and maintains two of the last remaining wood kilns on the island. Born in 1960 he grew up with a fascination for the kilns he passed every day on his way to school. His parents actively discouraged his collecting pieces of the roof tiles or onggi ware he could easily find scattered about the kilns. By 1980 when he began to look for a way to study making onggi, there were still 15 perfect kilns and the ruins of more than 25 others in the district which is noted for its good clay. After graduating from middle school Kang Chang Eoun had embarked on a career at the Jeju University Museum while pursuing his interest in onggi on the side. The rapid development of Korean society in the 1980s and 1990s brought the destruction of most of the remaining wood kilns in the east side of Jeju island due to road construction, increased building and a slackening of demand for traditional ceramics.

The spare intense young man was burning with a desire to preserve the onggi tradition and so he built two tube kilns of rough lava rock with the aid of one of the last master builders. Years in the building the larger of the two, called in Korean a norang-gul, was successfully fired in 1999. A simple arched tube inclined slightly to an outlet without any chimney, the kiln is fired to 1200 degrees Centigrade using slim sticks and bundles of brushwood. Amazingly the interior walls of the kiln reach their melting point and great drips of molten stone and ash residue are frozen in the act of dropping from the roof of the kiln. The norang-gul can contain about 600 medium sized water jars and it is easy to stand up and walk the length of the kiln interior if you watch out for stalactites. The smaller kiln called geomeun-gul, is fired to a lower temperature and produces carbon impregnated unglazed pottery.

Kang Chang Eoun divides the onggi tradition into four different roles all interdependent; clay and wood collectors, kiln builders, pottery makers, and firing masters. He mentions that the man who oversaw the kiln building is now dead and the firing master is 80 years old. The masters of the art of forming the approximately 200 shapes associated with Jeju onggi are now 70 and 78. If all the statistics seem to be grim the bright spot on the horizon is the determination of Kang Chang Eoun to make sure that the distinctive light weight unglazed onggi tradition of Jeju island will not be forgotten.

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