Rising Up

An emerging class of creators-of clothing, interiors, furniture and more-is proving you don't need decades of experience to make an impact. You just need something to say.

- Antonina Jedrzejczak and Rachel Gallaher

One benefit of Yoon Seok-hyeon’s mandatory military duty in South Korea was that he had time to read a stack of books about the design industry. He’d been learning about the practice in college before he served but found the programme’s tendency to steer its students to roles at big companies such as Hyundai a turnoff. “Dutch design caught my eye,” he says, “and I thought, maybe I need to stop studying in Korea and study abroad in Europe.”

In 2015, Yoon enrolled at Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands, one of the field’s top schools. The institution’s interdisciplinary approach sparked an interest in material studies and conceptual design. For his graduation project, he wanted to make ceramics but discovered that traditional versions have a hidden downside.

“After a piece has served its life, there’s no way to recycle the material,” Yoon says. “The main reason is the glazing. When you fire the glazing onto the ceramic at a high temperature, they fuse, and it’s very hard to detach, so they often end up in the landfill.”

While researching the long history of pottery, Yoon discovered ottchil, or ott, an age-old Korean technique that uses the sap of the ott tree as a natural lacquer. The varnish evaporates when heated at a high temperature, so the ceramic itself can be reused. Yoon’s final project—called Ott/Another Paradigmatic Ceramic—is a collection of bowls, vases and plates lacquered in varying shades of rich brown and black. The collection won the prestigious René Smeets Award, and some of its pieces now reside in the permanent collections of the Princessehof National Museum of Ceramics and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

And while he acknowledges that the project won’t solve an industry-wide sustainability problem, “I thought it could get people to think differently about how we make things,” Yoon says.