Jason Han on Korean Pottery, Onggi & Throwing Off the Hump at Tao of Clay
For founder Josh Herman, ceramics has long been more than a medium. It’s a way to explore ideas, express ourselves, grow through making, and connect with one another. In this series, we introduce you to a member’s personal story, process, and inspirations so we can learn from each other and deepen our understanding of not only our clay practice, but the people who make up The Tao of Clay and the broader ceramics community. Because when we share our craft, we build more than beautiful forms. We build community.
Meet this month’s featured artist: Jason Han, and our newest teacher of Korean Wheel Throwing. For more than 25 years, Jason has studied and taught Korean pottery, developing a practice deeply connected to food, fermentation, history, and the rhythms of daily life. His approach to clay is rooted in curiosity and function, asking not simply what a pot can be, but what it needs to do.
In this conversation, Jason shares how a lack of affordable dishes in grad school first led him to clay, his fascination with Korean Onggi and fermentation, and why throwing off the hump can teach us to trust our hands, let go of perfection, and find a different rhythm in our work.
1. You have spent more than 25 years studying and teaching Korean pottery. What were some of your first inspirations to work with clay?
Desperation, mostly.
In grad school my roommates and I couldn’t afford to buy dishes, so I decided I would make some. That should tell you how little I understood about pottery. I took a class at the student center and somewhere in that first term I ate a meal off something I had made, and I never quite got over that feeling.
Food and clay have been intertwined together for me ever since. The Korean calendar and cuisine divides the year into twenty-four jeolgi (절기 / 節氣), microseasons of about fifteen days each, and once you start cooking and eating that way you start making pots that way too: the bowl that's right for cold noodles in July is not the one you want in January for warm broth.
Twenty-five years later, I can't throw a bowl without day dreaming what I want to eat out of it. I'm remembering a meal I haven't had yet.
2. What currently drives your work, both inside and outside the studio?
Fermentation, mostly. I promise I’ll explain how that ties back to clay.
In December 2024, UNESCO added Korean jang-making — ganjang, doenjang, gochujang — to its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Kimjang, the communal making of kimchi, went on the same list in 2013. What's honored there isn't a recipe. It's a lived practice — a relationship between a household, a village, a season, and a jar.
That jar is onggi, and its material, making, firing, and use have been my obsession for a few years now. Onggi are the porous vessels Korean fermentation actually happens inside of — Koreans describe them as breathing. Korea recognized onggijang, the onggi potter's craft, as national intangible cultural heritage in 1990.
So the question driving my work is narrow and the answer keeps getting deeper: what does the food need the pot to do? Answer it carefully enough and you're holding a household, a village, and a season.
3. For someone who's never tried it — what is throwing off the hump, and why does it matter?
Throwing off the hump means centering one large clay mass and making pot after pot off the top of it, cutting each free and going straight into the next.
It isn't a Korean invention, and I'd be suspicious of anyone who told you otherwise. It's what potters do anywhere people need a lot of pots and don't have all the time in the world.
What Korean potters did was make that efficiency artful, and their bowls would become revered in Japanese tea culture. The ones that survive are not identical, not cold, and not careless, because the hand that made them knew the difference between play and function. The speed didn't flatten them. It loosened them.
The technique teaches your hands to commit. When there are eight more pots waiting in the mound of clay beneath the one you're making, you stop over-working the one in front of you.
4. You describe it as a different rhythm. What does that feel like when you're learning for the first time?
Especially for beginners, throwing off the hump is forgiving. It affords a kind of generosity. Your progress inside a single throwing session isn't a series of fresh starts.
Think about the things you learned as a child that never left you — riding a bike, swimming, jumping into a turning rope. None of them were learned by reasoning them out. You found the rhythm and then never thought about it again. Throwing off the hump is like that. If you don't like where a pot is going, you take the top off and you're already back in it. You haven't lost a beat.
The flip side comes later. Once the rhythm lives in your hands, you start noticing the difference between the third bowl and the eleventh. That's a quieter reward, and it's the one people stay for.
5. What do you hope students who take Korean Wheel Throwing leave with?
Honestly, I hope they leave a little bored of bowls. That's the sign it worked — the technique stopped being an event and turned into a habit.
The takeaway isn't that this way of throwing belongs to traditional Korean forms. It doesn't. Once the rhythm is in your hands it's yours, and what you make with it should look like your work, not mine or some Korean potter from the 16th century. Some will use it for test tiles, some for plates and vases, some will never throw off the hump again and will still throw differently, because four days of not being allowed to fuss changes what your hands consider finished.
What I'd like is for you to leave with one more thing you can do without overthinking it. That's a short list for most of us, and it's worth adding to.
Quick Fire Questions!
Coffee, tea, or ??? in the studio
Coffee in the morning, tea throughout the day.
Favorite tool you can't live without
Honestly, nothing. I've never gotten attached to one, and I work with whatever's within reach.
Favorite song, podcast, or ?? to listen to while in the studio
Bill Evans mostly these days
One word that describes your current work
Porous. Seasonal. Breathing. Sorry, I had more than one.
What are you excited to explore or share next
A multi-session course I've been refining called Politics of Teaware. We follow teaware from Song China — birthplace of whisked tea and, yes, foam art — through Korea and into Japan, refining our wheel-throwing skills as we make bowls, teapots, and other ceramics used in tea culture.
We look at how religion, trade, war, class, and taste changed what people made and what they considered beautiful. It raises the larger question: who got to assign these objects meaning, rewrite their histories, and decide what was valuable? My hope is that making them brings that history alive. You're not just throwing pots. You're putting your hands into 900 years of history.
Thank you For Joining Us Jason!
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