Tea Bowl

Tea practitioners sometimes repurposed vessels that were not meant for the tea ceremony. For example, a common but old Korean rice bowl could serve as a tea bowl, because its rustic appearance matched with the aesthetic of tea, which calls for an appreciation of the simple and the imperfect. This Gohon-type tea bowl, whose shape and glaze was based on the prototype of Korean rice bowls, was made to order in Busan, Korea, in the second half of seventeenth century.