사진 한 컷에 담긴 근대 공예사의 원풍경

Abstract

This is the very first time to approach the history of craft from the perspective of material culture in Korea. If the product of a material can be contributed to the lives of the people and the concluding result can be explicated within the category of culture, perhaps it is only natural that the history of craft and the material culture share overlapping grounds. If one attempts to study an object adopting the perspective of material culture, it is imperative, initially, to see the object as the product of usage. Rather than confining the determining factors of the form of an object to the particularity of the artist’s periphery, this paper aims to scrutinize the association between the various influencing factors in determining the form of an object and the life experience as a whole. The principal goal of this paper is to elucidate the grounds on which the form is determined, the kind of relationship that has been established between the object itself and the living-subject. Furthermore, it retraces and reconstructs the entire scenario. From this standpoint, the paper focuses on the factors other than the artist, exploring the ways in which they intervene to determine the form of a particular object. Primary attention is given to the understanding of its structure. That is, having the practical usage of the living-subject as the basis, it structuralizes the factors that play a significant role in determining the form of an object during the course of production and examines its mechanism. For this purpose, I have applied the image found in a photograph from early twentieth-century Korea to the actual contemporary living environment and have verified the result of the analysis. The selected photograph can be an invaluable text as it contains the object of the time and exhibits the condition of the lives of the subject. Based on the setting of the actual use of an object, therefore, it would be important to reenact as closely as possible to the original environment by arranging several determining factors. Having the apprehension of the interrelationship between the figures and objects in the picture, this endeavor, beyond formal studies of an object, thus, allows a systematic analysis of the relationships among person and object, object and object, and object and environment. Thus, in order to project the possible height of the female, the owner of the small table (soban) in the picture, the length of the sleeves was measured first and then the actual measurement was compared to the average height and the weight of the small table and the receptacles made around the 1900s. Given the established relationship among these factors, the result is applied to the reconstructed model, for instance, of the actual kitchen and the detached living room (sarangbang) of a gentry family and to the passageway between the two. The reconstructed model is designed to restore a precise contemporary condition. The actual three-dimensional environment of the Korean traditional house (hanok) is especially recreated to demonstrate the activity of the subject along the passageway in simulation. Through this examination, a more precise understanding of the various factors that involve around the object such as the environment of usage, the convention of demand, and the condition of labor as well as the intervening elements determining the form of an object was achieved. This study of material culture has substantiated the possibility for an attempt to provide a concrete answer to a fundamental question of the existence of a form, breaking away from the conventional formalistic method and offering a new perspective to studies in the history of craft. In the future research, while one retains the boundary of one’s own field of study, a mutual understanding and cooperation among the related branches of studies is encouraged.