Hanji Edition was born out of the desire to promote greater awareness of hanji—its intrinsic beauty, durability, and incredible versatility across a wide range of creative applications—for a primarily Western audience. Our goal is to expand and enrich contemporary art practices by incorporating a material and process used by our ancestors.1 This connection to material allows us to travel across space and time while simultaneously breathing new life into the craft. Materiality grounds us; our bodies and our relationship with the natural world are not void of meaning or spirit. Materiality matters, not just in the somatic nature of recreating ancestral practices, but in the handling, manipulation, and relationship that we develop with paper as the medium for our work as artists, creators, and culture bearers. It is upon this premise that we, as Hanji Edition, approach our work as curators.

We choose to work with hanji because we see it as a means for connection, both in sustaining cultural heritage and promoting creative exchange with other artists. Our devotion to hanji stems from our identities and lived experiences as Korean diasporic artists and educators. Fueled by the lack of English-language resources on traditional Korean craft as well as a shared desire to fill in knowledge gaps within diasporic culture, we embarked on individual research journeys into Korean papermaking and printing history. Our experiences uniquely shaped our perspective of hanji and motivation to continue this work.

Hanji is equal parts muse, historical artifact, substrate, and grounding presence. When we begin each Hanji Edition project, we consider both the theme of the project and the conditions that allow the material to play its role as conduit and connector. How do we curate a project that is ultimately in service to hanji and its distinct materiality? What can we learn from it as an equal collaborator and guiding force in the work? How can we cultivate a culture of creative freedom, experimentation, and dialogue with invited artists? We devote ourselves to this ongoing inquiry through Hanji Edition and have gained many valuable lessons and refined our curatorial approach over the years. What remains are our values for shared learning, experimentation, collaboration, adaptability, and flexibility.

Our first project was a traditional portfolio of prints, produced in 2018, that was specifically designed to highlight the potential of hanji as a substrate. This project allowed us to establish ourselves as publishers and work within known frameworks. Our curatorial choices allowed everyone involved—producers, artists, and viewers—to focus solely on hanji within the context of printmaking. We chose print artists whose work seemed conducive to working with Korean handmade paper and spanned different print mediums, including letterpress, mokuhanga (Japanese woodblock printing), intaglio, and giclée.2

Each of the five artists provided a written summary of their observations of working with the paper, which we included in the accompanying portfolio booklet. We were moved by their positive response to hanji and what it offered their individual artwork and print processes. Robert Kato, a fine art photographer, chose to make a photographic giclée print of a landscape scene shot at night with a long exposure. He wrote how “hanji, ever so gently, envelops the light, creating a luminous sheet of paper that embraces the image.”

The project also served as an opportunity for community building as we crowdsourced funding via an online platform, allowing us to share our story with wider audiences. This was also a foray into collaboration with each other. We did not live in the same city, so we heavily relied on Zoom, Google Drive, phone calls, and Adobe Cloud. Over time, we developed best practices for communication and online project development, production tracking, and correspondence.

Published during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, our second portfolio was a curated collection of five hanji works.This project was an exercise in dimensionality and a looser set of creative variables. We actively encouraged the new group of five invited artists to explore working with hanji as they wished, keeping ourselves open to wide possibilities in size, shape, and format of the finished presentation. We chose the artists based on their skills and interests, which included natural dyes, weaving and textile arts, cast paper, calligraphy with handmade inks and polychrome woodcut.3 The collection was accompanied by a pamphlet with letterpress-printed and lacquer-dyed hanji covers. We experienced challenges in production delays, presentation, and affordability due to the ongoing pandemic as well as lack of standardized dimensions amongst the finished works. To resolve the latter, we designed a custom clamshell box with upper and lower compartments. In doing so, we began to explore ideas of exhibition within the box format, considering questions of presentation, space, and sequencing. These were considerations that arose during the design of our first portfolio, but the format and dimensionality of the second portfolio challenged us to address these questions more deeply alongside issues of portability and archival integrity. This project taught us the importance of reverse-engineering the production and finding the sweet spot of core parameters–time, budget, and energy based on production needs. Above all, we learned the value of experimentation and play, balanced with the importance of constraints. This portfolio became a wonderful capsule collection for pushing the boundaries of paper and presenting hanji in a non-traditional format.

After two portfolios, we felt ready to try a different format and approached Brooklyn-based designer Pat Kim to create a series of 14 x 11-inch prints on hanji. Steph Rue made the paper at her Sacramento studio and shipped them to Pat, who built a vacuum base and hand-turned rotary woodblock in his Red Hook shop to create a limited-edition series of moiré prints. We offered this print both unframed and framed in 2023.

The success of this small project, together with our growing interest in working with fellow artists of the Korean diaspora, led to 오간색 (Ogansaek), our third major multi-artist offering in 2024. With the objective of exploring the cultural link to hanji as a heritage material, we invited five Korean American artists to work on this project using the theme of ogansaek (violet, teal, ochre, green, and burnt orange), unique colors made from the five traditional Korean colors known as obangsaek (red, white, black, blue, and yellow).4 This collaboration served to deepen our personal connection to contemporary themes of Korean diasporic culture and historic symbols found in East Asian philosophy.

In rite of passage, HyeYoon Song draws from her personal experience of immigrating from South Korea to New Zealand and the United States. She creates intersecting layers which invoke the search for one’s sense of self and place through photographic images of land, memory, and nostalgia, flanked by directional guardian animals found in Korean cosmology. Her process statement captures the essence of the book: “Printing on hanji that carries the cultural traditions of Korea, I felt an immediate kinship to the material. As I prepared and handled hanji throughout the entire printing process, an intimacy was formed between the paper and myself as I examined and learned the variations of texture and color, imagining the makers responsible for creating these papers.”

Ogansaek marks a departure from previous projects in two ways: it is presented both in book format and as individual prints, and it blends both Eastern and Western papers. The decision to offer multiple formats reflects some of the ongoing challenges that we face as publishers, including our desire to create flexible works at different price points. The decision to use Western papers for the book interior came as a compromise after we realized that the cost of producing an all-hanji book would be prohibitively expensive. We also chose to digitally print the interior text to help further lower costs, as we realized not everyone can afford fine-press-quality works.

Hanji Edition reminds us that reviving the materials and processes of our ancestors is what connects us to our communities, our stories, and ourselves. As access to heritage-based resources continues to be a challenge for members of the Korean diaspora, we hope to cultivate public awareness of hanji for cultural stakeholders and address ongoing issues of sustainability, affordability, and accessibility. We also look forward to generating broader community-building opportunities beyond the production of limited-edition works, which are confined to a narrow viewership.5 To this end, we seek continued support for ourselves and our audiences to have access to experimentation, play, exploration, and celebration of cultural heritage materials and techniques. This is deep work, and we hope to steward this project well into the future, with hanji as our inspiration and guide.

___________

notes

1. Hanji developed in Korea during the Three Kingdoms era (57 BCE–668 CE).

2. Hanji Edition 2018 featured the following five artists: Susan Belau, Claribel Cone, Robert Kato, Sara Langworthy, and Yoonmi Nam.

3. Hanji Edition 2021 featured the following five artists: Carrie Ann Plank, Oriol Miró, Tatiana Ginsberg, Velma Bolyard, and Radha Pandey.

4. The five Korean American artists featured in Ogansaek are Sun Young Kang, HyeYoon Song, Julia Chon, Rochelle Youk, and Robert Choe-Henderson.

5. As Hanji Edition evolves, we hope to produce more accessible hanji works and form outreach strategies that extend beyond the hand-papermaking and fine-press communities.

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍