Two Ways of Handling Space: Korea and Japan

So far this series has followed how the two countries' changho grew in step with their own climate and way of life: where the paper went and how the shadows fell, the mechanics of the lattice, the proportions.

One question is left. How does the person inside the room meet the nature outside?

The answer splits at one act, opening the door. Korea's deureo-yeolgae, and Japan's hikido, the sliding door.

Korea: Lifting the Boundary Away

Korean buildings don't stop at sliding a door sideways. They have deureo-yeolgae: doors whose whole panel lifts up and hooks to the ceiling.

When the door goes up, the wall that closed off the room is simply gone. The room becomes the maru, the maru becomes the yard, and the mountain in front comes all the way into the room.

The part that makes this possible is the deulsoe, a hook hanging from the ceiling.

With the door closed, it hangs there unnoticed. When the heavy panel is lifted, it catches and holds it.

What was a wall turns into nothing in a few seconds. It's a device for folding and unfolding the boundary itself.

Japan: Cutting a Frame Within the Boundary

Japan's hikido moves only left and right, in grooves in the floor and ceiling. It is never taken down or lifted away.

By its structure, however much you open, the same amount stays closed.

In return, the opening can be set precisely. How far you slide the door decides which part of the garden comes into the room.

The high point of this approach is the yukimi shoji (雪見障子).

Not the whole door but only a small pane at the bottom slides up. It hangs the garden and the falling snow at the eye level of someone sitting in the room.

As an earlier piece showed, the shoji was a fitting that divided up the inside. Rather than let all of nature in at once, it grew more precise at editing a piece of the view, at seated eye level.

The Same Borrowed View, Two Solutions

Chagyeong (借景), borrowing the view outside and making it part of your own space, is an old idea Korea and Japan share with the rest of East Asia.

What's interesting is that the two countries reached it by opposite means.

Korea lifted the wall away and let in the whole landscape. Japan built a frame and let in one piece of it. One is a borrowed view that erases the boundary. The other is a borrowed view edited by the boundary.

This difference, too, comes from conditions, not taste.

A Korean changho was an outer wall facing the yard directly, so lift the wall and there was nature. A Japanese shoji was a partition inside the amado and the corridor, so it grew toward handing out, precisely, a nature that had already been filtered.

Two Answers, Split on the Boundary

This ends the Korean and Japanese Changho series.

People have long been taken with the shoji's neatness, and have mistaken the thick lines of Korean changho for crudeness. What these five pieces looked at is what lies behind that impression.

The shoji's crispness came from lattice set behind the paper, with its shadow taken out of view. Its orderly module came from an interior sealed off from damp.

If the shoji's module and shadow are wabi-sabi made physical, the attitude that accepts things passing away, as No. 1 described, then the Korean changho is something else. Standing where it met nature head-on, it hid structure like eogeum-yukmo and meoreum inside the joinery. And it carried a story: the shadows spreading over the paper, and the hope for protection and good fortune in byeoksa and gilsang.

One side called nature into a frame. The other lifted the boundary away and stepped out into nature.

Looking at the same nature, the doors chose differently.

We tend to remember changho by pattern and design. But the real story of a changho isn't in the lattice you can see.

It's in the place where the door stood, and in the climate, the life, and the thinking that built up around that place.

Refinement was never on the surface. It's always on the inside of the joinery.