asana.ceramics
NYC Subway Grafitti ‘80s
Leaving Korea in 1982
Current Exhibitions
Photo credit: Michelle Wilkerson
“Can You Sit with Me?” 2025. Unglazed, charcoal stoneware, 21 pieces, dimensions vary.
On view as part of CITE - Ceramics In the Environment at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft until February 28, 2026.
“Can You Sit with Me?” is a 21 pc. installation of large hand-built slab construction as well as wheel-thrown pieces that together shape the immediate surroundings around two chairs and two stools. It invites the viewer to imagine the intensely intimate space created when two people sit and connect by a fire or over a cup of coffee or tea.
Increasingly rare in adulthood are the moments to simply sit with someone with no agenda, no express goal, but to exchange ideas and connect, perhaps over a beverage. From the start I wanted to bring a sense of domestic comfort and tranquility into the wild outdoors, by highlighting those increasingly rare moments of simply connecting with another person just to connect.
These pieces are made with a groggy charcoal clay that fires to black, allowing me to bring attention to form and structure without the distractions of surface decoration. The rough clay body is further juxtaposed with the elegance of smooth lines. But the kiln can be so unforgiving at times, and can become an unexpected collaborator of authorial intent. The lines and contours of my slab built pieces were once smoother and more elegant before they underwent the volatile environment of the second firing. The results, as they are, further emphasize the fragility and tenuousness of slow moments in our fast-paced lives. My original invitation to the viewer to “Sit with Me” has now become an open question about its possibility, and perhaps the impossibility of agenda-less, non-instrumental, meetings.
The long road to installation…
“A Living Vessel: Onggi, Fermentation, and the Self” 2025. Porcelain and stoneware. SOLD.
** Winner (1 of 3) Juror’s Merit Award for Best in Show**
On view as part of the Craft Texas 2025 exhibit at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft from September 6, 2025 - January 31, 2026.
A series of 5 previously never shown vessels that embody fissure and the combining of unlikely elements, highlights both brokenness and attachment as necessary features of a life that persists through change. The series ends with the same porcelain vessel(* see below) that has since undergone transformation through glaze and firing.
About the juror: Abraham Thomas - Since 2020, Thomas has been the Daniel Brodsky Curator of Modern Architecture, Design, and Decorative Arts at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He previously worked at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., first as the Fleur and Charles Bresler Curator-in-Charge of the Renwick Gallery, and then as Senior Curator at the Arts and Industries Building.
“A Living Vessel: Onggi, Fermentation, and the Self”
Past Exhibitions
“Elemental Onggi: The Shape of Breath,” 2025. High-fire clay and glaze.
On view as part of Clay Houston’s “Four Elements: Earth, Fire, Water, Air” exhibit at Monterroso Gallery 11/8—11/29.
Rooted in the Korean tradition of onggi, “Elemental Onggi: The Shape of Breath” explores the vessel as a living body of transformation. Formed from earth and fire, this vessel is a body of breath and matter, holding both emptiness and presence.
The onggi carries the breath of its maker and the memory of its lineage, and remembers its origins while becoming something new. The piece stands as a metaphor for both inheritance and inquiry—how something ancient can hold new life in its surface and form.
“Onggi: A Fermentation Vessel” 2025.
Exhibited as part of the Multiplicity 2025 show at the Silos in Sawyer Yards June 7-July 19 2025.
An assimilation story that repeats a constant onggi form with varying glaze finishes and surface design techniques, this auto-biographical series represents the shifting aesthetics the artist encountered from birth to the present, and depicts her evolution from immigration onward to the present in 37 vessels. The final pot in the series depicts “Now” with an unfinished and raw - not yet fired - porcelain vessel that was later glazed and finished for Craft Texas (* See above).
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Itadakimasu, 2024
Kinder Morgan’s Taste exhibit, Spring 2025
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Three-faced, 2025
HTX Clay
Featured Artist, June 2025
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Elemental Onggi: The Shape of Breath, 2025
Monterroso Gallery, Four Elements exhibit, Fall 2025
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Aquifer, 2022
Kinder Morgan’s Green exhibit, Spring 2023
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Primordial, 2022
ClayHouston’s Formative Narratives exhibit, Fall 2024
Kinder Morgan’s Wilderness exhibit, Summer 2022
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Parched, 2023
ClayHouston’s Flux exhibit, Fall 2023
