Dancing with the Center of Clay: Kim Hye-jung

Kim Hye-jung calls herself a “steward of clay.” For her, clay is not simply a material. It was once part of living things, and she tries to feel that history in her hands while working.

Her relationship with clay began in childhood, when she ran through forests and invented games without playground equipment. At university, she began a long struggle with the potter’s wheel, hoping to make a single vessel with a perfectly balanced center. More than a decade of practice and a doctorate did not make the task easy. She eventually spent three more years training in a rural Welsh studio, surrounded by little more than cows and sheep.

There, she found a new understanding of balance. When she spread a handful of clay thinly across the wheel, a flexible vessel opened like a flower. “The center was not a fixed single point. It constantly emerged from the rotation of the wheel and the relationship between the clay and my body.” Later, dance training helped her learn bodily balance and freer movement. Wheel throwing became less a technical exercise than a dance shared by herself and the clay.

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Cats, birds, plants and people all decompose after they die and remain in the soil. When I work, I feel that the clay in my hands was once a living organism.

The Fukushima nuclear accident and tsunami in March 2011 disrupted the calm, natural beauty she had pursued. Images of villages collapsing and being swept away left her doubtful and powerless. When she finally returned to her workbench, the vessels awaiting completion seemed to overlap with memories of the devastated village, scattered belongings and people’s faces.

She danced a “tsunami dance” in anger and grief, and the vessels rolled, broke and crumpled across the studio. Once the storm passed, she gathered the fragments. Some returned to the clay, while she gently handled the broken sections of others. Their cracks and distortions no longer looked like defects to erase. They became traces of difficult lives and part of a process of renewal. Clay that was once a leaf, bird or human remains now gains new life through her hands and fire, carrying its own wounds, memories and center.

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The center was not a fixed single point. It constantly emerged from the rotation of the wheel and the relationship between the clay and my body.