Glenn Ligon at Frieze Seoul: The Problem of Calling Black ‘Black’
Glenn Ligon brought black moon jars to Seoul. That sentence seems straightforward enough, until you actually look at the jars and start asking what exactly we mean by black.
During Frieze Seoul 2026, Ligon was presented by Hauser & Wirth at COEX while, elsewhere in the city, Black Moons occupied APMA Cabinet. The exhibition, his first solo show in South Korea, ran from 14 August to 5 September and brought together his ceramic moon jars with works from the Static and Redacted series.
It would be easy to describe the ceramics as an inversion. The Korean moon jar is one of the most recognisable objects of the Joseon ceramic tradition and is associated with white porcelain. Ligon makes it black. An American Black artist turns a Korean white object black and immediately there is enough symbolism for an exhibition press release, a fair preview and several theories about identity.
But looking at the work that way closes the discussion almost as soon as it begins.
Because Ligon’s black is not quite black.
First, the moon jar
The historical moon jar, or dal hangari, developed during the Joseon dynasty. These large porcelain vessels were generally made by forming two separate hemispheres and joining them before firing. The method itself made absolute symmetry difficult. A jar might lean slightly, flatten somewhere, reveal its joining line or change shape in the kiln.
Those irregularities are now part of what we admire about them.
The National Museum of Korea connects Joseon white porcelain with ideas of restraint, simplicity and the Neo-Confucian culture of the period. The moon jar eventually became one of its most recognisable forms.
Yet there is something strange in describing these objects simply as white.
The museum itself distinguishes between milky white, snowy white, ashen white and bluish white. Some vessels contain several of those tones at once. Firing can produce yellowish areas. Time can alter the surface further.
So the supposedly white object Ligon has turned black was never really one white to begin with.
That detail interests me more than the obvious reversal.
If we already accept considerable variation while continuing to call a moon jar white, what exactly are we doing when we call another object black?
Ligon and the ceramicist did not see the same colour
Ligon discussed the problem during Frieze Seoul. While developing the moon jars with the ceramicist he worked with, the two sometimes disagreed about the colour in front of them. The ceramicist would identify a surface as black. Ligon saw dark brown, deep blue or grey.
His conclusion was simple: “colour is culturally specific.”
There is a temptation here to jump immediately into theory and announce that colour is therefore a cultural construction. I would be more cautious.
Clay is not a cultural construction. Neither are pigments, firing temperatures or the behaviour of light. The material is doing something whether we have a word for it or not. Ligon himself seems interested precisely in that point, in what happens when materials do not entirely obey the intentions imposed upon them.
The complication arrives when we name what we see.
One person says black. Another says blue.
Neither has changed the object.
The difference is apparently small, almost trivial, but it opens an uncomfortable gap between perception and classification. We often behave as though words simply record the world after we have seen it. Sometimes they are already organising the world while we are looking.
That becomes particularly difficult with a word such as black.
Black is a colour. Black is also not just a colour
For Ligon, black can never remain completely innocent as a chromatic term. His work has spent decades moving between language, race, American history, sexuality and representation.
The problem is not solved by capitalising one Black and leaving another black.
That distinction is useful in writing, but an artwork does not come with the same typographical protection. A dark ceramic surface can be black as matter and simultaneously enter the history of Blackness as identity. The two meanings approach each other even when we would prefer to keep them apart.
Ligon has worked inside that ambiguity since the late 1980s, frequently using language borrowed from writers including James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston and others. Words in his paintings are rarely passive quotations. They are repeated, obscured, smeared or made difficult to read.
The viewer recognises language but cannot always possess it immediately.
This places Ligon inside a much wider argument about identity and representation in contemporary art. For decades, part of that argument concerned who could finally become visible inside museums and dominant cultural narratives. That battle was necessary and remains unfinished.
But visibility creates another problem. Once somebody becomes visible, who gets to name what has appeared?
Baldwin is not background material
The connection with James Baldwin makes the Seoul presentation more complicated.
At Frieze, Ligon showed a large drawing, which he described as the largest he had made, related to Baldwin’s 1953 essay Stranger in the Village.
Baldwin wrote the essay after living for a period in a Swiss mountain village where, as a Black American, his physical presence produced curiosity, assumptions and projections among people who had little or no direct experience of Black people.
The essay is about racism, certainly, but reducing it to that is insufficient. Baldwin is also writing about being interpreted before being known. His body arrives in the village already surrounded by meanings generated elsewhere.
That is why his presence in Ligon’s work matters.
A moon jar has also arrived carrying meanings accumulated before Ligon touched it: Korea, Joseon, porcelain, whiteness, restraint, craft, history. Ligon does not erase those associations. He interferes with them.
Baldwin’s text and the ceramic vessel obviously do not have equivalent histories, nor should they be forced into an elegant metaphor. But both make classification difficult once we look beyond the first available word.
A stranger.
A Black man.
A white moon jar.
A black moon jar.
Each description tells us something. None tells us enough.
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There is another problem: whose moon jar is this?
There is a question I would not avoid.
What happens when an American artist takes an object deeply associated with Korean cultural history and makes it serve a conversation largely shaped by American ideas of race?
At an international art fair this matters even more. Cultural difference travels very well through the global art market. A recognisable local object can quickly become material for an international artist, an international gallery and an international audience. The process may be intellectually productive, but it can also reduce one culture to useful visual vocabulary.
It is therefore possible to look at Black Moons with some suspicion.
The fact that Ligon worked directly with a ceramicist and engaged with the technical behaviour of the clay does not automatically resolve the problem. Collaboration is not an ethical certificate.
But it does change it.
According to Ligon’s account, the making of these objects produced disagreement and uncertainty rather than the simple execution of a predetermined concept. The material did not always produce the expected colour. More importantly, Ligon and the ceramicist did not necessarily agree on what that colour was.
This is where the cultural encounter becomes more convincing to me.
Not because everybody has exchanged traditions harmoniously, but because something has failed to translate perfectly.
Contemporary art often talks enthusiastically about hybridity, exchange and dialogue. Real exchanges are usually less comfortable. Something gets misunderstood. Something refuses to fit. Something remains with the other person.
That is considerably more interesting.
The white jar was already unstable
After looking at Ligon’s work, I found myself returning to the historical moon jar rather than moving further away from it.
The National Museum of Korea’s discussion of the object is unexpectedly useful here because its own language undermines any simplistic opposition between white tradition and black intervention.
The museum describes multiple whites.
This is not a semantic game. A bluish white surface and an ashen one are visibly different, yet both remain within the category of white porcelain. We tolerate this because categories are practical. Without them we could barely speak.
Problems begin when convenience becomes certainty.
Ligon has not discovered that colours vary. That would hardly merit an exhibition. What his intervention does is place an already unstable chromatic category next to another category carrying far heavier cultural and historical consequences.
Black is never merely one thing in his work. But, rather inconveniently, neither was white.
This also separates Ligon’s intervention from a simple reversal of racial symbolism. Compare it, for example, with Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary, where Black identity collides directly with European religious iconography and with assumptions about what a sacred image is supposed to look like.
Ligon’s gesture is quieter. You could almost miss the problem if the ceramicist had simply agreed with him about the colour.
What happens when the label arrives first?
Museums need labels. Art fairs need them even more.
A fair compresses enormous amounts of information into a few days and a few square metres: artist, gallery, nationality, medium, dimensions, date, provenance, price. We glance, identify, move on. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. Without categories Frieze would be practically impossible to navigate.
But speed has consequences.
We become very good at recognising things and less certain that we have actually looked at them.
This extends beyond colour. It appears whenever an artist becomes primarily “African”, “female”, “queer”, “political”, “Korean”, “Black”, “Palestinian” or any other term that begins as useful context and quietly expands until it occupies almost the entire artwork.
The problem is familiar in the work of artists such as Wangechi Mutu, whose hybrid bodies repeatedly frustrate attempts to stabilise gender, species, cultural origin and identity. It appears differently in Fred Wilson’s institutional critique, where museum classifications themselves become evidence of the histories institutions have chosen to emphasise or suppress.
A label is useful until it begins replacing the object.
That may be the simplest way into Ligon’s Seoul works.
Maybe we were too quick to call it black
Frieze Seoul ended on 5 September. The booths are coming down and the usual machinery is already moving towards whatever fair, exhibition or auction comes next.
Ligon’s moon jars leave me with a much smaller question.
Someone looks at a vessel and says it is black. Someone else says no, it is brown. Or blue. Or grey.
Normally that disagreement would last a few seconds. One person might shrug, lighting might be blamed, and everyone would move on.
Ligon does not move on.
Once race, language and the history of the moon jar enter the conversation, the apparently insignificant disagreement becomes harder to dismiss. Not because there is a mysterious correct answer hidden somewhere inside the clay, but because our certainty about what we see has turned out to depend on more than the object itself.
And perhaps that is enough.
Not every artwork has to solve the politics it touches. I am increasingly suspicious of art that pretends it can.
Sometimes it is more useful when an object leaves a familiar word slightly damaged.
After Black Moons, black still means black.
It just takes a little longer to say it.
