Student Spotlight | Young Su Ko ’18

November 2, 2017

Name: Young Su Ko ‘18
Hometown: Los Angeles, CA
Special Skills: Ceramics

This Cate senior has a full course load: Japanese, Computer Science, Art History, English, Statistics, and Orchestra; but today we are talking Ceramics. It’s S-block (free period) and Young Su Ko ’18 is at the Firestone Ceramics Studio with a handful of other students. Faded jeans, sweatpants, clay-spotted tees is the aesthetic on this breezy but sunny fall day.

Young Su is just starting his second year of ceramics classes at Cate and yet teacher John Swain says, “he is the most devoted ceramicist here at the moment.” Young Su says, “From an early age I was exposed to a lot of art,” – his grandmother painted, his mother played the violin, and his aunt was a theater actor.

Despite his early introduction to the arts, Young Su’s first taste of ceramics came freshman year in Foundation Arts, “but we just made a bowl.” Since then he’s moved on to making large rounded vases with quarter-sized openings. A bevy of them line the tables in the ceramics barn. His most recent project is a series of Japanese tea bowls. “They have a unique shape. They almost have a purposeful imperfection,” – a “specific aesthetic” Young Su says he is still researching and still working on. “Because I’ve lived with western culture all my life, I don’t think I fully understand all the details of it. I’m trying to experiment.”

His tea bowls were in part inspired by his host dad during the 2016 Cate in Japan program. “He was telling me about a Japanese aesthetic, where sometimes imperfections are a good thing – and that really got me thinking about Japanese ceramics,” a subject that he was free to research and practice in Advanced Ceramics this year.

“The class is really awesome,” says Young Su, who enjoys the freedom teacher John Swain affords students. “He lets us pursue our own projects as long as it’s structured. If we want to make something that we are interested in, he lets us do that.

For this senior, learning about and researching ceramics is just one aspect of the experience. And while he excels at making all sorts of pottery, he says on Saturdays he enjoys spending a couple hours in the barn, throwing clay, and enjoying the quiet.

Keep your eyes peeled for one of Young Su’s favorite pieces featured in the upcoming fall issue of the Cate Bulletin.