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정 (Jeong) — The Korean Word That Cannot Be Translated

2026 · KOREAN CULTURE

There is a word in Korean that has no equivalent in English.

Linguists have tried.
Attachment. Affection. Bond.
None of them are quite right.
The word is 정 — romanized as Jeong —
and it describes something that grows between people
not through grand gestures or declared love,
but through time. Through proximity.
Through the accumulation of small, unremarkable moments
that somehow, quietly, become everything.

How Jeong forms.

You do not decide to feel Jeong.
It arrives without announcement.
It is the feeling for the neighbor you have argued with for twenty years —
and would still bring soup to if they were sick.
It is the attachment to a place you left long ago,
that pulls at something unnamed when you pass by it.
It is the bond between people who have shared difficulty —
not because the difficulty was beautiful,
but because they were present for each other inside it.
Jeong does not require that you like someone.
It requires only that you have been with them.
Long enough. Closely enough. For something to take root.

The paradox of Jeong.

There is a phrase in Korean:
정 때문에 못 떠난다.
I cannot leave because of Jeong.
It can mean staying in a relationship that no longer serves you.
In a job. In a city. In a friendship that has faded but never quite ended.
Jeong is not always comfortable.
It is not always chosen.
Sometimes it is simply what remains
after everything else has been reconsidered.
This is what makes it so honest —
and so difficult to explain to someone
who grew up with a different word for love.

Jeong and the things we keep.

I think about Jeong when I look at objects that should have been thrown away.
A cup with a chip in the rim.
A worn-out bag.
A plant that has been repotted so many times
it barely resembles what it once was.
We do not keep these things because they are beautiful.
We keep them because something accumulated between us and them —
some quantity of mornings, of ordinary use, of time.
That is Jeong, too.
It seeps into objects the same way it seeps into people.
Slowly. Without asking permission.

A last thought.

The name of this blog — shimiiru — means to seep in.
I chose it because I believe the things that matter most
do not arrive all at once.
They seep. Slowly. Quietly. Into everything.
정 is exactly that.
The feeling you didn’t notice forming
until the day you realized
you could not imagine its absence.
Thank you for reading shimiiru this week.
See you again on Monday.

Yayoi Kusama — She Covered the World in Dots to Survive It

2026 · PERSON · ART

Before the dots, there was something she needed to escape.

Yayoi Kusama was born on March 22, 1929, in Matsumoto, Japan.
As a child, she began to see things.
Flowers that spoke to her.
Patterns that pulsed and multiplied.
A world that seemed to dissolve at its edges into endless repetition.
She picked up a pencil. She drew what she saw.
And she never really stopped.

What the dots actually are.

People see Kusama’s work and think: playful. Joyful.
And it is all of those things.
But the dots began as something else entirely —
a way of neutralizing the hallucinations that had followed her since childhood.
By painting what she feared, she found she could contain it.
She called this process self-obliteration —
the dissolving of the self into the pattern,
until the anxiety had nowhere left to go.
The dots were not decoration. They were survival.

New York. The 1960s. Nobody took her seriously.

Kusama moved to New York in 1958.
She was a young Japanese woman in an art world dominated by men.
She organized happenings. She made soft sculptures.
She created room-sized installations when the word installation barely existed.
Ideas that would later define contemporary art —
the immersive environment, the infinity room, the participatory artwork —
she was doing them first, with almost no recognition.
She returned to Japan in 1973, largely forgotten by the West.

The return. The recognition.

Decades later, the art world caught up.
The Infinity Mirror Rooms — chambers lined with mirrors and LED lights,
reflecting her dots into an endless, disorienting universe —
became some of the most visited artworks of the 21st century.
People waited hours. They wept inside them.
She was in her eighties when this happened.
She had been making the work for sixty years.

She still goes to the studio every day.

Since 1977, Kusama has lived voluntarily in a psychiatric facility in Tokyo.
Every morning, she walks across the street to her studio.
She paints.
In 2026, she is 97 years old.
She is still one of the most productive artists alive.
There is something in that —
in a person who found the one thing that quieted the noise,
and simply never stopped doing it.

Why she matters beyond the photograph.

It is easy to reduce Kusama to a backdrop.
To the yellow pumpkins. To the mirror rooms. To the dots on everything.
But look at the full arc of her life and you see something else:
A woman who was told, repeatedly, that her vision was too much —
too obsessive, too feminine, too foreign, too strange —
who kept going anyway.
Who turned what frightened her into what defined her.
That is not a brand. That is a life.

The Beauty of Imperfection — Korea’s Buncheong Ware

2026 · KOREAN CULTURE

A bowl that was never meant to be perfect.

There is a Korean ceramic tradition that the Western art world took centuries to notice. Not because it was hidden. But because its beauty asked something unusual of the viewer — the willingness to find grace in what is uneven, unpolished, and quietly alive.

It is called Buncheong.

What is Buncheong?

Buncheong (분청사기) emerged in Korea during the early Joseon Dynasty, in the 15th century. It grew from the ashes of Goryeo celadon — a more refined, aristocratic tradition. What replaced it was something looser. More human.

Potters began coating dark clay with white slip — a liquid mixture of fine clay and water — then carving, stamping, or brushing patterns into the surface before it dried.

The result was never perfectly symmetrical. Never without variation. And that, it turns out, was exactly the point.

Why Japan fell in love with it first.

In the 15th and 16th centuries, Japanese tea masters discovered Buncheong bowls. They used them in tea ceremonies — not despite their imperfections, but because of them.

The philosophy of finding beauty in the incomplete found its ideal vessel in a Korean potter’s everyday bowl.

There is something quietly ironic about this. The bowls were ordinary objects in Korea. Functional. Unremarkable. And yet they became treasured objects in another culture’s highest ritual.

What makes a Buncheong bowl beautiful?

Look closely at one and you will notice:

The white slip is never perfectly even. The brush marks are visible — sometimes bold, sometimes hesitant. The stamp patterns repeat, but never exactly. The glaze pools differently in each curve.

It is a record of a hand moving through clay. Of a specific morning in a specific workshop, centuries ago. No two are the same. That is not a flaw. That is the whole conversation.

A last thought.

We live in a time of surfaces that are optimized, filtered, corrected. Buncheong asks a different question —

What if the mark left by the making is the most honest part of the thing?

That question, it turns out, never goes out of style.