The clay is brown, thick, still damp. The potter rolls it between his palms, stretches it into a long coil which he spirals onto a kick wheel. No electric wheel, no mold. His hands raise the wall of a jar that will be one meter twenty high, in a single piece, without a seam. Mid-height, he strikes the exterior with a wooden paddle while his other hand, inside, holds a smooth pebble against the wall. Each strike compresses the clay, densifies it, making it both solid and porous. This gesture is a thousand years old. It is what gives onggi its unique property: the ability to breathe.
A Jar That Breathes
Onggi is no ordinary pottery. It is a living vessel. Its wall, fired at a precise temperature, between 1,100 and 1,200 degrees in a pine-fed wood-fired kiln, develops a porous microstructure that allows air to pass through but retains liquids. This paradox is at the heart of everything. Oxygen circulates through the walls, microorganisms work, fermentation regulates itself. Kimchi breathes in onggi like wine breathes in an oak barrel.
This is not a poetic metaphor. A study published in 2023 in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface showed that the CO₂ permeability of onggi accelerates and influences the fermentation dynamics of kimchi, compared to a plastic or glass container. The jar regulates temperature, absorbs excess moisture, maintains a stable anaerobic environment. The taste is enhanced: deeper, more complex, longer on the palate. Korean grandmothers knew it. Science confirms it.
Onggi is not just for kimchi. Doenjang, fermented soybean paste, a pillar of Korean cuisine, ages in onggi jars for months, sometimes years. Gochujang, chili paste. Ganjang, traditional soy sauce. Rice vinegar. The entire battery of fermented condiments that constitutes the soul of Korean gastronomy was born in these brown earth jars, lined up on house terraces like a silent alphabet.
The Jangdokdae: A Disappearing Landscape
Anyone who has visited a traditional Korean house, a hanok, knows the jangdokdae: the jar terrace. Dozens of onggi of all sizes, arranged in tight rows on a stone or earthen platform, exposed to the sun and wind. The jangdokdae always occupies the highest point of the terrain, where ventilation is optimal. It is the pantry of the house. It is also its sanctuary. Korean women prayed in front of their jars. The state of the doenjang foretold the fortune or misfortune of the coming year.
This landscape has almost disappeared. The massive urbanization of South Korea from the 1960s emptied the countryside and stacked families in apartments. No terrace, no jars. The refrigerator replaced onggi. Industrial kimchi, manufactured in factories and sold vacuum-sealed, replaced grandmother’s kimchi. In two generations, a millennial food system collapsed.
Onggi potters followed the same path. In the 1970s, there were several hundred active workshops across the country, concentrated in the clayey regions of Chungcheong and Gyeongsang. Today, there are only a few dozen left. Master potters recognized by the government as holders of intangible cultural assets, the Korean equivalent of Japanese Living National Treasures, can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
Mungyeong: The Last Bastion
Every spring, the small town of Mungyeong, in North Gyeongsang Province, organizes the Mungyeong Chasabal Festival. People come for the tea bowls, but also for the onggi. The region is rich in ferruginous red clay, which gives the jars their Siena earth color and frost resistance. A few workshops remain in the surrounding hills, often run by men in their sixties or seventies who learned the trade from their fathers.
The process is demanding. The clay is extracted by hand, stored for several months to mature, kneaded by foot, then coiled onto a slow wheel. Firing lasts three to five days in a dragon kiln, a tunnel kiln dug into the hillside, heated with pine wood, whose temperature is controlled only by fuel supply and vent openings. The potter does not sleep during firing. He monitors the color of the flame, the smoke, the smell of the vitrifying clay. At the kiln exit, the jars are coated with a natural glaze made of wood ash and earth, no chemicals, no industrial enamel.
A failed onggi, cracked, poorly fired, too porous or not porous enough, is irreparable. It is broken, and they start again.
The Return Through Fermentation
Something has changed. Since the mid-2010s, driven by the global wave of natural fermentation, from Sandor Katz in the United States to Noma by René Redzepi in Denmark, onggi is making a comeback. Not as a museum object. As a tool.
In Seoul, in the Bukchon Hanok Village district, workshops offer introductions to onggi pottery. Participants are not tourists looking for folklore. They are young Koreans, twenty-five or thirty years old, who want to rediscover the taste of their grandparents’ kimchi. They buy jars, install them on their apartment balconies, and start their own fermentations. The hashtag #옹기 (onggi) has accumulated hundreds of thousands of publications on Korean social networks.
The movement extends beyond Korea. In London, onggi workshops were held in 2025 and 2026, led by Korean potters invited by independent ceramic studios. In Colorado, an artisan pottery workshop has been offering onggi manufacturing courses since 2026, in partnership with a master potter from Mungyeong. Post-hallyu Korean cultural pride, after cinema, K-pop, cuisine, finds a new vector in onggi. Less spectacular than a Bong Joon-ho film, but older and deeper.
Kwak Kyungtae: The Master Who Teaches the World
Among the potters leading this revival, Kwak Kyungtae holds a singular place. An onggi master based in South Korea, he has dedicated his life to perpetuating the traditional hand-coiling technique. But he has also done what few Korean master artisans accept to do: leave the workshop and go teach elsewhere.
Kwak has given workshops in Europe, in France, Germany, the United Kingdom. He demonstrates the gesture, explains the logic of the porous wall, turns the kick wheel in front of Western ceramists accustomed to glazed stoneware and electric kilns. The technical gap is dizzying. The European potter seeks watertightness, a smooth glaze, a vitrified surface. The onggi potter seeks breathing, controlled porosity, a living surface. Two philosophies of fired clay, face to face.
This dialogue resonates with other renaissances. In France, Puisaye stoneware has seen a resurgence of interest since star chefs rediscovered confit pots and terrines in glazed earthenware. In England, Stoke-on-Trent, the historic capital of British ceramics, devastated by deindustrialization, sees young potters returning, buying old workshops and relearning 19th-century techniques. Everywhere, the same movement: a return to raw material, to slow firing, to the vessel that contributes to the taste of what it contains.
Earth and Time
Onggi is a patient object. It takes months to prepare the clay, days to build a jar, more days to fire it, months for the kimchi it contains to reach its full flavor. Everything in this process opposes speed. Everything demands slowness, attention, repetition.
Perhaps that is why it is returning now. In a world saturated with plastic, instant delivery, and industrial food, the breathing jar says something people want to hear. That taste takes time. That matter matters. That the hands that shape an object give it a quality the machine cannot reproduce.
The question of transmission remains. The workshops in Bukchon and the workshops in London do not train master potters. They train enlightened amateurs, fermentation enthusiasts, curious ceramists. The manufacture of a true onggi, a jar one meter twenty high, built in a single go, fired in a dragon kiln for five days, requires years of apprenticeship. The masters who know how to do it are old. Demand is returning, but the chain of transmission remains fragile.
In the hills of Mungyeong, a potter lights his dragon kiln in the early morning. Smoke rises straight into the cold air. He is seventy-two years old. His son works in Seoul, in IT. His daughter teaches English in Busan. No one will take over the workshop.
But on the balcony of an apartment in Gangnam, a brown earthenware jar awaits its first kimchi. The clay is porous, the wall breathes. Someone, somewhere, wanted it to continue.