In the gallery at New York’s  Korea Society there is a small but fantastic exhibition of pojagi, traditional wrapping cloths of Korea.  Each of the items in the exhibition is from one of several New York collections who lent pieces to this show.

The pojagi included in this exhibition are a range of types: from piece-constructed utilitarian examples stitched from leftover ramie cloth to those which are artfully constructed of brilliantly colored silks to heavily embroidered examples used for ceremonies such as weddings.

The exhibition also shows related material such as Korean embroidery, objects from daily life, and cultural kin to pojagi from sources outside Korea such as American style quilt squares and Japanese fukusa.

On March 18th the Korea Society presented a panel discussion entitled “Pojagi: Cloth, Color and Beyond” which examined the history of pojagi in Korea, its impact on international contemporary fiber arts and a glance at the universal impulse toward patchwork, focusing on American pieced quilts.

Presenters were Lee Talbot, Assistant Curator of Eastern Hemisphere Collections at The Textile Museum, Washington, DC;  Seta K.Wehbé, Assistant Collection Manager of the Antonio Ratti Textile Center at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Chunghie Lee, the well-known artist whose own work is based in the pojagi tradition.

Below is a 20th century chogak po pojagi made of ramie (moshi) from Koo New York.

On my website, I have a beautiful, small, ramie pojagi for sale: even though it is small and deceptively simple-looking, the skill necessary to stitch the “petal-like” forms on the cloth is quite extraordinary.  Have a look here.

The flinty light of today’s rainy spring day makes for a subdued atmosphere to present a collection of exuberantly colored Indian turbans that were dyed and worn in the bright desert sun of Rajasthan.

This is a tight little group of mothara, lahariya and bandhani turbans: generally speaking you can characterize the shape resist techniques as such: mothara , very simply put is pleated and twisted on two diagonals and can yield a  complex and dazzling criss-cross effect.  Lahariya–which literally means “waves”– shows an intricate chevron-like pattern, and bandhani is what is called tie-dye.

Three madder-dyed bandhani turbans are positioned on the right side of the group: do they seem familiar in design?  Through a circuitous history of trade and travel, bandhani morphed into the present-day bandanna.

The group of turbans sits in a mended wooden trough from Gilgit, Pakistan; the trough sits on a collection of ralli quilts from Sindh, an area that traverses Pakistan and India.