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Strength and meaning through adversity: celebrating Chuseok 2022 

Seasonal celebrations 

The Korean word gyeol-sil means ‘the fruits of something’, or ‘the outcome of something’. In the amber glow of the Autumn Equinox, Chuseok—Korea’s Harvest Season—is an opportunity to celebrate the gyeol-sil of the year with loved ones. Gathering over food and exchanging gifts, family and friends come together to revel in the abundance of nature, spend time in each other’s company, and rally their spirits for the colder months ahead. In the midst of a season that can induce a melancholic state of mind, Chuseok encourages its observers to embrace the present, welcome the future, and honour the past that has generated both. In 2022, this season of Korean thanksgiving carries particular poignancy, offering communities a moment of pause—time to recognise how challenging conditions can strengthen individuals and imbue each new day with a greater sense of beauty and meaning.

Thanksgiving in-store 

To mark Chuseok 2022, the Aesop stores of Garosugil, Samcheong, Seongsu and Hannam will offer visitors a visual, tactile and sonic encounter with Bangjja bronzeware created by Jiho Lee, a master of the craft. Designated as the Important Intangible Cultural Heritage in UNESCO’s 1983 listing, Bangjja is a traditional Korean brass-and-bronze-working technique reliant on fire, seawater and fierce exertion.  The youngest of three generations of masters in the craft, Jiho Lee will make a series of Bangjja objects to be displayed in-store for this celebration of Chuseok.

Bangjja: an ancient craft

Be it a plate, a cup, or a bell, a Bangjja piece can be a thing of striking beauty; organic in form and clean in function. Unlikely to discolour and only made more lustrous through use, Bangjja objects seem to generate their own, muted glow—a luminosity that becomes dazzling in direct light. But beyond their aesthetic appeal, Bangjja wares possess another quality of great value: strength. Bangjja does not warp or break easily. This characteristic stems from the painstaking way each piece is made.

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Bronzeware formed by a thousand taps

Fire. Water. Force. All three must be rigorously engaged in the creation of a Bangjja object. A prized artform of the Joseon era, Bangjja bronzeware begins as an ingot of copper and tin, melted together in a precise ratio. The technical excellence of a Bangjja piece is testament to the method employed to forge it—a fiendishly difficult procedure called Nephim that requires the master craftsperson to repeatedly heat and beat the bronze. The shape and strength of the piece hinges on the perseverance of the maker, who must endure stifling temperatures and the extreme physical exertion of striking the Bangjja object tens of thousands of times. While Jiho Lee has evolved elements of the original Bangjja process to include updated workspaces and the aid of a mechanised hammering tool, he maintains a remarkably traditional production method—one that honours the generations of Bangjja craft masters before him.

Revealing an inner radiance

Once its desired form is achieved, the candescent Bangjja piece is plunged into a vat of seawater. Drawn out, the ‘quenched’ bronze has the mottled patina of something hauled from a shipwreck. It is time to peel the surface away. A sharp tool shaves ribbons of metal, known as Garusoe, from the Bangjja piece. From beneath the oxidised exterior, a radiance is revealed—the bronze’s ‘true self’.

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The fruits of perseverance

At every stage of its execution, the Bangjja process is a fitting analogy for the shaping and strengthening of a human life— one that has the ability to reframe the experience of adversity without trivialising it. As the world recovers from years of shared hardship, reflecting on the time through a ritual like Bangjja—where the brutal begets the beautiful—pays respect to the struggles while appreciating the rewards they have yielded.

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