This doesn’t look like much. An old, cracked bowl with poorly-done glaze. But to the Japanese in the late 1500s, this was a prize! Provincial Korean porcelain bowls, such as this one, were highly valued as tea bowls in Japan. The discoloration of the clay was caused by the tea’s seeping through pores in the glaze. Japanese connoisseurs poetically compared the subtle variations in color to the rain-stained plaster walls of a dilapidated hut. And by “poetically” I mean, they literally wrote poems about tea bowls like this one.
Those cracks by the way? They are repaired with gold lacquer. It was the traditional method for repairing chips and cracks in Japan, meant to highlight the life each vessel had lived.
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