Embracing beauty in imperfection

Recently, while observing the Chuseok full moon with my family, I was reminded of another moon — one I encountered thousands of kilometers away from Korea. It was a simple white moon jar displayed in a British museum, and it quietly changed the way I understood beauty.

During my graduate studies at Oxford University, I became an avid museumgoer. There is something captivating about museums: they hold still fragments of the past, allowing us to encounter civilizations separated from us by centuries.

Whenever I visited a museum, I usually spent the first few hours moving chronologically through history and then geographically across different regions of the world. With seemingly a million things to see, I developed a habit of choosing a particular theme on each visit and juxtaposing artifacts from different civilizations to see how each approached the same form.

On visits to the British Museum in London and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, my chosen theme was pottery and ceramics. Moving from one civilization to another, I encountered objects of remarkable craftsmanship — intricately decorated, carefully proportioned and often strikingly symmetrical. Across cultures, symmetry and proportion seemed to recur as markers of beauty. Then I reached the Korean collections.

At both museums stood a "dal hangari," or moon jar, from the Joseon Dynasty. Compared with the elaborate ceramics I had spent hours admiring, it appeared almost startlingly simple. Its surface was largely unadorned, covered in a milky white glaze. Its form was not perfectly symmetrical. One side curved differently from the other; its contours carried subtle irregularities.

Yet the longer I stood before it, the more captivating it became. Large Joseon moon jars were traditionally crafted by joining two separately thrown halves, leaving slight variations in their shape. Rather than diminishing the object, these imperfections give each jar its distinctive character. No two are quite alike. Its generous "yeobaek" — empty or unadorned space — similarly did not feel like an absence. The emptiness was part of its presence.

After hours of looking at objects remarkable for their precision and decoration, I found myself most mesmerized by an object that did not seem to demand perfection. Perhaps that is why the moon jar stayed with me.

Having completed my undergraduate studies in Korea, I often felt surrounded by a culture of perfectionism. From appearance and academic achievement to careers and definitions of success, there can be enormous pressure to construct an impeccable life: attend the “right” university, secure the “right” job and follow the “right” path.

In constantly filling the blank spaces of our lives according to someone else's picture of success, however, we risk leaving little space for ourselves.

The moon jar suggests another possibility. Its asymmetry does not need correcting and its empty space does not need filling. Neither prevents it from being beautiful; they are precisely what give it character.

Looking again at the Chuseok moon, I thought about those quiet white vessels in the museum. Perhaps a meaningful life, like a moon jar, need not be perfectly symmetrical or completely filled. Sometimes, yeobaek is where our individuality has room to emerge.

Lee Yoon-ki recently completed his MPhil in International Relations at the University of Oxford and graduated summa cum laude from Yonsei University with a BA in International Studies. He is currently a Korea Times Global Supporter, Marcellus Policy Fellow, Pacific Forum Young Leader and RUSI NextGen member.