Details
About this piece
Korean houses were not built with cupboards in them. Storage was furniture, and furniture was made to be moved: low enough to use from the floor, light enough to go out of the door when the household changed house. A nong is the clearest case of that thinking. It is not a tall cabinet. It is two separate boxes that happen to stack, and they come apart because coming apart was the whole point.
The maker spent everything where it shows and nothing where it does not. The carcass, the door backs, the drawer sides and every lining are paulownia, blond and almost weightless, chosen because it barely weighs anything and insects leave it alone. The faces are zelkova, cut for figure and set into dark framing the way a picture is set into a mount, so the same board reads one way from the left and another from the right. Walk around it and the argument stops: the flanks are plain wide boards, undecorated, because nobody was going to stand there. Each case is closed by a single round brass plate spanning both doors, a disc against all that grain.
Open it and the inside is papered. Korean chests were lined with mulberry paper, and the paper was often whatever paper the household had, which is why linings of this kind are sometimes found to be old letters and account pages pasted face down. Each box lifts with one hand.
Specifications
- Korea, late 19th to early 20th century
- Maker unknown, unmarked; two-tier clothing chest, icheung-nong
- Zelkova faces on a paulownia carcass, brass fittings, papered interior
- 157 cm high assembled, 88 cm wide, 45 cm deep; upper case 78.5 cm, lower 77.5 cm; 12.8 kg each
- Cleaned and fed
- Old splits and patches to the back boards, old filler to the joints; brass shows even wear, nothing replaced
- Color
- Brown
- Style
- Asian
- Material
- Elm
- Condition
- Good
- Dimensions (cm)
- W 88D 45H 157
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