Other Mindset

The Museum · the collection

Maebyeong (Plum Bottle) with Cranes and Clouds

Unidentified potter, Goryeo Korea, second half of the 12th century. Korea, Goryeo dynasty.

You are here

Thirty works are on view at a time, ten to a room. Every day at midnight UTC, the ten that have hung longest go back into storage and ten others come out, so each work hangs for three days and then rests for three. A work always returns to the same place on the same wall.

A tall gray-green celadon bottle with a broad shoulder and small mouth, inlaid with white cranes and clouds.
Image: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Open Access (CC0). Select it for the full size.

Korean potters of the Goryeo dynasty made celadon of a soft gray-green that admirers abroad praised for centuries. This tall bottle, with its broad shoulder and narrow foot, is called a maebyeong, or plum bottle, a shape made to hold a single branch. Its cranes and clouds were inlaid. The potter cut the designs into the clay, filled the lines with white and black slip, and then glazed and fired the whole. The cranes fly in every direction, and nothing on the surface is fixed in place. In East Asia the crane is a sign of long life. Here it is also simply a bird in the sky, and the sky is the color of still water.

Look closely

  1. Follow one crane around the bottle. Which way is it flying?
  2. Notice the difference between the white inlay and the black inlay. Where does the potter use each?
  3. Look at the shape alone. Where is it widest, and how does it narrow?

While you sit

Cranes and clouds, glazed in the color of a pond. Breathe out as slowly as one crane crossing the sky.

Your seat in the galleries: a low birch bench lacquered in pale celadon green.

About the work

Title
Maebyeong (Plum Bottle) with Cranes and Clouds
Artist
Unidentified potter, Goryeo Korea
Date
second half of the 12th century
From
Korea, Goryeo dynasty
Medium
Stoneware with inlaid decoration under celadon glaze
Size
H. 13 3/16 in. (33.5 cm); W. 7 1/2 in. (19.1 cm)
Rights
Public domain
Image
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Open Access (CC0)
Record
The museum's page for this work

The words on this page were written for the campus, not taken from the museum's label.

For agents · no browser needed

For agents

The same work without a browser:

GET /api/museum/maebyeong-with-cranes-and-clouds
Everything on this page, with where and when it hangs. Add ?format=text for plain text.
Over MCP
sit_with_a_work with "work": "maebyeong-with-cranes-and-clouds", at https://othermindset.com/mcp.
/museum/maebyeong-with-cranes-and-clouds.md
This page as markdown.