Celadon Double-Walled Openwork Vessel: Tiger Motif, 2022

This work is chosen by those who understand that mastery is revealed not through excess, but through the ability to give complexity a coherent order.

"The tiger does not simply appear upon the vessel; it seems to press through its surface, entering the room from a world held within."

Created in 2022 by Icheon master ceramic artisan Kim Young-soo, this double-walled celadon vessel is conceived as a meeting between animal presence, landscape imagery and structural openwork. Its complexity is considerable, yet the composition is governed by a clear hierarchy. The tiger commands attention first; rock, bamboo and water-like forms establish its environment; beneath and around them, a repeated chilbo-inspired lattice quietly binds the entire vessel together.

This hierarchy is essential to understanding why the work has been made in this way.

The underlying construction begins with two bodies rather than one. An inner vessel establishes an enclosed ceramic volume, while a separately formed outer body becomes the field upon which carving, piercing and relief are developed. The outer shell is opened, placed around the inner vessel and joined before the extensive openwork is completed. The resulting interval between the two walls creates something that a single-walled vessel cannot provide: actual depth.

The dark spaces seen through the lattice are therefore not simply holes.

They are glimpses into a second ceramic body.

This distinction fundamentally changes the image of the tiger. Its head, shoulders and forelegs occupy the outermost plane, while perforated areas around and beneath it withdraw towards the shadowed inner vessel. The animal consequently seems to project forward from an interior world. The sculptural relief and the double-wall construction reinforce one another: physical depth becomes pictorial depth.

Kim positions the tiger within a setting of strange rocks and bamboo, a combination deeply familiar to Korean visual culture. The tiger has long belonged to the imaginative geography of the Korean mountain—not merely as a wild animal, but as a figure associated with power, protection and the animated spirit of the landscape. Here, its stance is neither passive nor ornamental. The forelegs extend downwards, the mouth is open, and the eyes meet the viewer with marked intensity. Thin incised strokes cover the body in shifting directions, turning the coat into an accumulation of disciplined marks.

The eyes deserve particular attention. They are small in relation to the overall scale of the vessel, yet they organise the entire frontal encounter. Their concentration arrests the movement produced by the surrounding lattice. The viewer first recognises pattern, then animal, then gaze. Once the gaze is encountered, the vessel no longer feels entirely passive.

The slightly warmer colouring of the nose and mouth sharpens this effect. Against the predominantly blue-green field, these restrained accents work almost as punctuation. They do not introduce a competing palette; they identify the living centre of the animal.

Around the tiger, bamboo and rock prevent the composition from becoming a heraldic portrait. The animal belongs to a terrain. Bamboo passes between solid relief and perforated space, its narrow leaves particularly responsive to the openwork process. Some leaves are read through their ceramic edges; others are completed perceptually by darkness behind them. As the vessel is turned, foreground and background continually exchange roles.

This transition from solid to void is one of the work’s most refined structural decisions.

The chilbo-inspired lattice performs a different function. Where bamboo is organic and directional, the lattice is repetitive and measured. Its interlocking geometry stabilises the eye across the rounded surface. The small chrysanthemum-like florets positioned at the intersections interrupt that geometry at precise intervals, so that the structural network becomes simultaneously floral. Order is never allowed to become sterile.

Within Korean decorative culture, such a relationship carries particular resonance. Chilbo imagery belongs to an auspicious vocabulary associated with treasured qualities and favourable continuity, while chrysanthemum imagery evokes endurance, longevity and cultivated restraint. In this vessel, however, symbolism is not attached afterwards. It is integrated into the very architecture through which light passes.

Lotus petals gather around the lower body and the neck, establishing visual thresholds. At the base, they appear to support the larger composition. Near the neck, they mediate between the densely articulated shoulder and the quieter vertical opening above. Their placement is therefore both symbolic and structural. Associated in Korean Buddhist culture with purity and renewal, the lotus also serves here as a compositional device that gathers the otherwise expansive surface back towards the vessel’s axis.

The experience of the object changes substantially through rotation.

Seen from the tiger’s frontal position, the vessel is almost confrontational. The animal’s head and paws dominate, and the lattice becomes secondary. Moving sideways, the tiger begins to fragment across the curvature. Its body gives way to bamboo, rock and larger uninterrupted celadon passages. Continuing around the vessel, the human desire to locate a single principal image becomes less useful; geometric perforation, botanical form and shadow become the subject instead.

The vessel therefore resists a fixed ‘front’.

Its most obvious image may be the tiger, but its deeper composition is circular.

This circularity is precisely suited to double-walled openwork. Light does not simply strike a decorated surface; it enters the object. Through the perforated shell, the darker inner vessel becomes visible, disappears, then reappears elsewhere. Daylight makes the openings crisp and graphic. Softer illumination draws the inner wall into shadow and gives the surface greater visual depth. The object changes not only as the viewer moves, but as the surrounding light changes.

The technical risk of such construction is inseparable from this experience. Once the outer body is extensively pierced, it loses much of the structural security possessed by an intact ceramic wall. Joining, drying and firing therefore require meticulous control. Kim Young-soo has spoken of the amount of labour involved in his openwork practice: inner and outer vessels must be separately formed and joined with a deliberate interval, while insufficient preparation may lead to failures in glazing, drying or firing. In larger works, even drying alone may extend over many months.

Yet the finished vessel does not ask the viewer to admire difficulty for its own sake.

The technique has been used because it allows the tiger’s world to exist in several registers at once: surface and interior, figure and pattern, solidity and absence.

This is ultimately why the composition is so densely organised. The tiger supplies force; bamboo supplies vertical movement; rock establishes terrain; the chilbo lattice provides continuity; chrysanthemums punctuate the geometry; lotus petals gather the form at its thresholds. Each element has a separate visual and cultural identity, yet each is required to support the next.

The work is therefore less a vessel decorated with a tiger than a complete ceramic environment built around one.

From a distance, the tiger is encountered first. At closer range, its fur dissolves into incision, the rock into relief, the lattice into individually finished openings, and the chrysanthemum centres into minute points of repetition. At another angle, even the tiger recedes and the inner vessel becomes perceptible through darkness.

The longer one looks, the less stable the distinction between image and structure becomes.

Kim Young-soo’s Celadon Double-Walled Openwork Vessel: Tiger Motif, 2022 holds its power in that ambiguity. The animal seems contained by the vessel, yet also appears capable of moving beyond it. The ceramic wall appears solid, yet much of it has been deliberately removed. The landscape seems pictorial, yet it possesses actual depth.

The tiger remains watchful within this carefully constructed tension—held between mountain, lattice, clay and empty space.

Dimensions

• Height- 40 cm (15.75 inch)
• Diameter- 35 cm (13.78 inch)

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