a hundred cities within: seoul with a filmmaker, a novelist, a designer and a musician.

But one specific item was our true destination. It was a foot-and-a-half-tall, white, rotund, 18th-century porcelain vessel called a moon jar. Lit from above, it appeared to float like a heavenly body over its pedestal. A jagged, tea-colored stain cut across the surface like an abstract painter’s flourish, the result of oil once held in the vessel seeping out. […] She visits the jar regularly, she said, and it offers her peace when she is stressed. If Seoul’s manic side pulses through her settings, the jar shapes her work in a different way. “I want to write sentences as beautiful as the moon jar,” she said. “I haven’t done it yet.” She is particularly in love with the oil stain. “The line of the stain shows the flow of time. Humans didn’t make it; only history and nature could.”