조각보

Scraps joined into a whole.

Jogakbo is pieced from leftover cloth, often summer ramie that glows when held to the light. The seams that join it and the cloth it is made from.

Jogakbo (조각보, 'piece cloth') is patchwork bojagi sewn from offcuts left over from making clothes, including the curved pieces cut away in shaping hanbok. Women made them at home as part of everyday needlework, and the habit of saving scraps reflects a household economy where cloth was costly; scholars call it an 'aesthetic of waste' (폐품의 미학). Most surviving pieces date from the 19th to mid-20th century and served as wrappers and food covers. Bojagi were not collected as art in Korea until the late 1960s, when Huh Dong-hwa and his wife Park Young-sook began buying them; their Museum of Korean Embroidery opened in Seoul in 1976 and from 1986 sent bojagi and jogakbo exhibitions to Japan, Britain and beyond. Huh often compared jogakbo to the geometric abstraction of Piet Mondrian and Paul Klee, a comparison now standard in writing about them, though the makers worked centuries before and without any such idea.