‘Colour Is Culturally Specific’ – Glenn Ligon in Seoul

I'm Glenn Ligon. I'm an artist living and working in New York City. Moon jars are big round jars, traditionally in white, made of porcelain with a white glaze on them. And they're evocative of a full moon. So I thought, well, what's the intervention that I can make in the tradition? Well, the first idea was to make white porcelain moon jars and then glaze them in black. But that just felt unsatisfying. I thought black clay would be the intervention, you know, to make moon jars out of black clay. I realized that the ceramicist I worked with had a very different concept of what the color black was than I did. He would show me things and say, this is black. And I would look and say, no, that's dark brown, or that's very deep blue, or that's gray. And I realized that in Asian context, the word black encompasses a bigger, bigger range than it does in the West. So I had to expand my notion of what that color meant to even to call them black moon jars. That was actually fascinating to think that color is culturally specific. Because the jars are so big, they have to be made in halves and then put together. They're not perfect sphere. Making an imperfect thing was interesting to me because I feel like a lot of my work works with the imperfect or the mistake. The work here at Frieze, these drawings, this series called Blue for JB, James Baldwin, start with a silkscreen of a Baldwin text from Stranger in the Village. It's silkscreen on these blue backgrounds in a water-soluble ink. Can't really control what the water is going to do, how the ink is going to spread, how it's going to dry. And then I had an accident in the studio where I had a bucket of watery blue paint, and I spilled it on the drawing. I thought, oh, I've screwed this up. But then realized like, oh, that's another way to change the text. You can't make accidents happen. You just have to know when they're good.