Chongjin
— — a coast that keeps its own counsel.
Not only on a wall.
“A port city on the far north-eastern coast of the Korean peninsula, the capital of North Hamgyong Province. Heavy industry, iron and steel, a long working harbour on the East Sea. The city carries the memory of the 1990s famine the country called the Arduous March, and it also carries the daily traffic of a coast that has been fishing the same waters for centuries. from the studio
Chongjin, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Chongjin sits on the East Sea coast of North Korea, the administrative seat of North Hamgyong Province, roughly 80 kilometres south of the Russian border at the Tumen River. The city grew through the early twentieth century as the Japanese colonial administration built out the port and the railways. Its population is estimated around 600,000, the third-largest in the country by most counts. The Kim Chaek Iron and Steel Complex anchors the industrial economy, and the harbour faces north-east into open water beyond the breakwaters.
The East Sea here runs cold even in summer, fed by the Liman Current down from the Sea of Okhotsk. The fishing fleet works pollock, squid, and crab from grounds that have supported the coast for generations. Onshore, the steel mills draw cooling water from the same coastline that the small boats leave from at first light. The bay itself is broad and shallow at the head, deeper at the mouth, sheltered enough to have made the port worth building in the first place.
The mid-1990s sit heavily on the city's memory. The famine the state called the Arduous March struck the north-eastern provinces hardest; Chongjin and the surrounding counties lost an unknown but substantial portion of their population to starvation and related illness between 1994 and 1998. The city has rebuilt in the decades since, but most outside accounts of the famine, Barbara Demick's reporting among them, were anchored in Chongjin and the lives of people who lived through it there.