LAUREL KENDALL

10.18399/acta.2014.17.2.001

intangible heritage handicrafts Koreanness authenticity Performance

The designation of handicrafts as “intangible heritage” under South Korea’s Intangible Cultural Properties Protection Law contains an inherent contradiction: The skills of potters, weavers, paper-makers and other craft producers are akin to the embodied and artful work of dancers and singers in performance genres similarly recognized by the law, and they are likewise realized through disciplined and embodied knowledge made manifest in evanescent performance—thus their “intangibility.” But in contrast with performing arts, handicraft production leaves its tangible trace in a material object, in such things as cast metal, worked wood, ceramics, and textiles. In other words, the resulting craft object is a witness to the performance of intangible heritage and thus to the validity of the object’s claims as an authentic and valuable Korean thing. Market value makes possible the viability of the craft, but marketable crafts also assume innovations and compromises to meet consumer tastes with a viable price point. In this article, I explore the ambiguities of handicraft performance, how certain aspects become front stage and iconic demonstrations while others are carried out backstage, how claims are made for the Koreanness of the performers, and how some processes and materials are necessarily compromised in the practical production of handicrafts for a high end market. It is not my aim to argue against a compromised authenticity but rather to situate the story of Korean handicraft inside an ongoing discussion about what it means to do handicraft in the broadest possible sense in the twenty-first century. The verb “to do” is carefully chosen to include not only the critical process of making things in the sense of throwing pots or looming cloth but the surrounding networks of material acquisition, labor, circulation, marketing, consumption, and general discursive “craft talk.”