I have loved Glenn Ligon’s Moon Jars since they first appeared in “In A Year with a Black Moon” in 2019, in what turned out to be the last show at Rat Hole Gallery in Tokyo. And by love, I mean hearted them every time I’ve seen them on Instagram.
Their narrative hasn’t changed much in the intervening years, though: Ligon developed them with a Korean ceramicist in Japan over three years. They’re made with black clay instead of the kaolin white clay of Joseon originals. The rest of the discussion quickly shifts to Moon Jars themselves, and their history, and even that can be a very short conversation.
Glenn Adamson, who posted about Ligon’s Moon Jars installed at the Fitzwilliam in 2024 went on to write for FT about the record-setting Joseon Moon Jar from Christie’s in 2023 turning up at Frieze Seoul in 2025. And that article got scraped into the lot essay glazing the next Important Moon Jar at Christie’s last spring.
Meanwhile, the Hauser & Wirth exhibition of Ligon’s Moon Jars in Seoul last month seems almost invisible—except for this video of Ligon talking about them himself for Frieze Seoul 2026. There are insights into the cultural specificities of blackness, and the celebrated imperfections of the moon jar’s fabrication, both concepts that resonate deeply with Ligon’s larger practice.
But there’s no hint yet about Korean responses to these reworkings of an iconic national form, or to its complicated historical entanglements with western Modernism, and with Japan.
From Instagram, at least, Ligon’s long, personal and creative engagement with Japan appears steady and extensive, going well beyond tourism or fandom. And it’s easy to imagine an organic and productive context for the Moon Jars’ development.
But imagining is all there is, because I don’t see any more discussion of their origins or their making. Or in the moon jars’ intersections with Japanese colonialism, and the complicated dynamics around the elevation of simplified, utilitarian ceramics in the early 20th century by Japanese craft modernists like Sōetsu Yanagi, and then by modernists in the west It feels relevant that both of the major Joseon moon jars at Christie’s came from deep in Japanese collections—and that rather than discuss their provenance at all, Christie’s rehashed the Anglo-centric story of the moon jar at the British Museum.
In contrast, Ligon just unveiled another sculpture of fired clay, where the complex context of who made what, how, and where, feels baked right in. For Coyote Time, the triennial in St Louis organized by Counterpublic, Ligon has created Who Builds Anything In This Country? a serpentine wall of handmade bricks marked with the fingerprints and marks of local students and seniors. This, in a state and a country where, before the Civil War, most bricks were made by enslaved people.
There’s a fuller moon jar discussion to be had, and almost ten years into Ligon’s project, I cannot be the only one who’d love to have it. I’d also like to see them in person.