Sunday, August 2, 2009

Son Pal Young 손팔영


We have trouble finding this studio in downtown Gwangju and the phone response that we should look for the sauna building and head upstairs over Selfwine seems a bit odd. Yet here it is on the second floor of an office building with all the amenities. Maybe ceramic artists shouldn’t always have to work in windowless basements or drafty barns. Son Pal Young greets us at the door and launches into a tour of the kiln room with large gas kiln, spacious production room with two young assistants hand modeling sculpture, and the large showroom with shelves of functional pottery and figurative sculpture.


A decisive man with a preference for sculpture but a realistic view that functional ware is his bread and butter, Son Pal Young explains the studio location by referring to an unsuccessful attempt to move to a country location. Too quiet and too hard to attract customers was his view of that experiment. So he took a suite in the building which his sister owns and has been happy ever since.


His signature pieces are large bulls and horses which are formed by throwing the hollow cylindrical bodies and modeling the limbs. He also makes a series of figures on their bellies which he explains are angels. The angels seem somewhat androgynous but we can see a definite penis on a number of them. They are flying rather than lying and some of them are grouped with shapes which represent mountains or waves,q he explains. The draft animals represent childhood memories of the countryside and the flying angels came to him in a dream.

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