South Korea has integrated itself into Western contemporary culture through K-Pop music, K-Dramas, film and cuisine. But what may not be as prevalent overseas is their deeply rich traditional history, and Korea’s Cultural Centre presents this with Beyond Icheon: The Space Within Form. Just a stone’s throw away from Trafalgar Square, this exhibition gathers age-old ceramic practices with contemporary subjects from modern artists, sparking a rare dialogue with UK craft in relation to the Asian region.

Icheon is famously known for their crafts and traditional art practices, and this essence fills the exhibition room with found materials and folk tales etched on each vessel. Starting with the sprawling collection of traditional ceramics made by award-winning sculptors, each vessel carries a story in their shape, glaze and stone. From celadon glaze on vases to jars made with the signature buncheong clay, each piece served as a nod to ancient processes that’s still done today. 

This section of the exhibition also brings an introspection to the sculptors’ surrounding environments as they take inspiration from Icheon’s natural landscape while crafting. Take the floral motifs broken by mountains, evenly spaced across a cylindrical jar. Made with buncheong clay, these sculptures are structurally clear and uniform. Other common motifs include bamboo on jade-green celadon glaze, intertwined branches made with white and white clays, flying birds and Hangul typography that jut out of a moon jar. 

Then excluding a vessel’s functionality with decorative purposes is a pagoda crafted with celadon glaze and a wide plate-like structure, shaped by natural variations in the firing process. 

Proceeding towards more contemporary sculptures, it takes the shape of angular vases, unconventional shapes and textures. Rather than serving a functional purpose, these pieces stand as purely decorative yet innovative, looking beyond the motifs, form and colour that shaped the classic Icheon ceramics. The same mountains that inspired a jar’s motifs are demonstrated through its form, celadon clay literally shaped into mountains and stamped with textures. A porcelain jar inspired by its traditional counterpart, wrinkled and coarse by accumulating layers atop one another. An unbalanced jar made from Jeju volcanic soil, these sculptures disregard the rules of precision and instead let nature run its course. 

There are also contemporary sculptors that combine contemporary stories with traditional ceramic processes, most notably alumni from the Royal College of Art and Cardiff Metropolitan University, among other UK institutions. Emphasising how traditional processes mould these contemporary pieces during firing, these ceramic works also express contemporary stories.

Saeri Seo’s Crooked Good Child (2024) incorporates the traditional Moon Jar, punctured with a gaping hole that is filled with blooming porcelain flowers that symbolise growth from healing. Mimi Joung records time through the therapeutic process of tracing and layering, inspired by the Korean Monochrome Movement. Representing a search of identity post-war, her Shadows of yes and no series (2024) represents layers of tension between western powers, modernism and tradition. Hwajeong Yoo’s Geol II (2026) physically captures the movement of time through the role of glaze. She captures unpredictability, reflected in how the sculpture builds layers over time in a unique and organic structure.

Placing what serves as a time capsule for ancient ceramics and its evolution into contemporary society is an excellent way to illustrate how far Icheon’s arts and crafts have gone. Having travelled across continents to the UK, we get to see beyond the final product and into their creation processes. In an age where creativity often feels like a rat race, curator Jaemin Cha encourages viewers to pause and focus on each step.

She says, “What truly defines the work is the accumulation of decisions such as the invisible conditions of judgment, experience, and restraint. This exhibition invites audiences to look beyond the surface and see making itself as a way of thinking.”

Icheon and beyond: the space within form is exhibiting at the Korean Cultural Centre until 5 June 2026 and is free to enter. All images courtesy of the artist and KCCUK. Photography by Dan Weill.