MeongSeok

Meongseok is a traditional straw mat, woven from rice straw and laid out in a courtyard or on a wooden porch to dry grain or to serve as a place for people to sit and lie down. Architecturally, it embodies a horizontal structure that spreads flat against the earth — the inverse of a roof rising toward the sky; formally, its essence lies in the lattice pattern created by tightly woven straw strands together with the flexibility to be rolled and unrolled. Symbolically, it is a tool that has long held people and grain, labor and rest, at the lowest point of daily life: where the roof marks the summit at which a hanok meets the sky, meongseok marks the lowest point at which it meets the ground. MeongSeok carries over these two material qualities of the traditional mat — weaving and rolling — into wood. Slender wooden slats, joined at tight, even intervals, form a single continuous plane, translating the meongseok's method of weaving straw strands into one surface directly into structure. Rather than remaining flat, this plane curls up on its own from one end into a cylindrical form — a gesture that reproduces, in the rigid material of wood, the everyday motion of rolling up a meongseok when it wasn't in use, and the particular flexibility of moving between unrolled and rolled states. The gaps between the slats let light pass through, recalling how a meongseok let wind and light filter between its straw strands, and the smooth transition from flat plane to cylinder produces the sensory illusion of rigid wood bending as though it were fiber. Standing in counterpoint to the ascending lines of the roof-derived works (the Chimi and Seonjayeon series), this piece completes a single formal language that begins again from the ground — from the lowest point.