At first glance, Emily Yong Beck’s exuberant ceramic sculptures appear cute, precious even. The bulbous vessels, encrusted with the smiling faces of familiar cartoon characters, are as colorful and cheerful as children’s playthings. Only upon closer inspection do you notice the discordant glazes, the crude textures, and the face’s unblinking eyes and warped mouths. Up close, the figures are uncanny, bordering on grotesque, yet entirely engrossing. You can’t look away even as the yellow cat flickers between a representation of Pikachu and something much more sinister.  

The shift in perspective animates Beck’s experience with Japanese kawaii culture. As a child, she was infatuated with the cast of characters and creatures she met through anime, manga, Nintendo, and Pokémon. Immersion into these fantastical universes offered both entertainment and a continued sense of comfort and security. But when stories from her Korean grandmother and one too many glossed-over history lessons prompted her to take a closer look, the veneer of cuteness and its pronouncement of harmlessness tarnished and crumbled.

Beneath the jubilant world of adorable, mute creatures, Beck found a political campaign aimed at obscuring Japan’s violent occupation of Korea and its incendiary role in World War II.  Far from occurring organically, the aggressive development and dissemination of the cute aesthetic was part of an international rebranding, recasting the imperialist country as non-threatening and incapable of inflicting harm, now or then.

The sculptures in Soft Power visualize Beck’s reckoning with history’s claim on the present and her attempt to reconcile dialectically opposed truths about a beloved art form. Offering a poignant example of the ethical dilemma slated to define our contemporary moment: Can we cleave the past from the present? The art from the artist?

Beck renders kawaii imagery in her distinctive slap-dash, gloopy style to recontextualize the cartoons within a modern discourse that acknowledges colonialism and political erasure. Built-up masses of clay create a striking bass-relief effect on the surface of the vessels. Here, the figures emerge from the sculpture’s spatial boundaries, poised on the verge of leaping into the third dimension, fully formed and autonomous. (And perhaps free from the constraints of their origin story.)

The mesmerizing technicolor palette and luminous ultra-glossy finishes are achieved through a mix of glazes, including celadon borrowed from historical Korean pottery techniques. Beck also appropriates traditional Korean ceramic shapes. Where Cuties Jar and Pokémon in Grass Jar resembleporcelain moon jars, Friends Pot and Cuties Bottleneck Vase are in the style of the customarily paired maebyeong and joobyeong vessels. Resisting formal hierarchies, she replicates the lid of a humble onggi jar, traditionally used for fermentation, as with Bulbasaur and Squirtle.

Beck fosters an intuitive and dynamic relationship with the clay rather than adhering to the prevailing aesthetic in Korean ceramic arts that values formal restraint, technical perfection, and total domination of the material. That clay is, in fact, earthen introduces a striking parallel between the treatment of material and the treatment of land. Impressions from her fingers and palms spread across the visible surface, preserving the process and production of each form as the form itself. In this way, you can almost see the artist’s negotiation with the material between representation and abstraction, control and freedom, the old methods and the invention of the new.—Tara Anne Dalbow