Andong
— — the village the river bends to hold.
Not only on a wall.
“A city in the inland east of South Korea where a meander of the Nakdong River wraps almost full circle around Hahoe, a 600-year-old village of thatched and tile-roofed houses still lived in by the Ryu clan. Andong keeps what other Korean cities let go: Confucian academies, masked dances handed down since the Goryeo period, soju distilled the old way. The autumn mornings come up with river fog, and the smell from the jjimdak alley off the old market carries three blocks. — from the studio
Andong, 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.
Andong is a city of roughly 150,000 in the inland east of South Korea, the administrative seat of North Gyeongsang Province since 2016. It sits on the upper Nakdong River, about 270 kilometres southeast of Seoul. The river runs through a string of ridges and old farmland, looping into the near-circle that defines Hahoe Folk Village, inscribed as UNESCO World Heritage in 2010 together with Yangdong. The Dosan Seowon Confucian academy, founded in honour of the scholar Yi Hwang in 1574, lies on a quiet bend upstream and was also inscribed by UNESCO in 2019.
Andong's calendar is built around its mask culture. The Hahoe Byeolsingut Tallori is a shaman-derived village ritual masked drama performed since the late Goryeo period; the carved wooden masks are designated National Treasure No. 121 and held by the National Museum of Korea. Every late September and early October the city hosts the Andong International Mask Dance Festival, drawing troupes from across Asia and Europe. The festival has run annually since 1997 and routinely fills the riverbanks at Hahoe for ten days. Andong soju, distilled at around 45 percent ABV, is the customary pour through the long evenings.
Hahoe Folk Village sits about 24 kilometres west of central Andong and is reached by city bus 246 or by taxi; admission is modest and the village is still lived in, so visitors keep to the lanes between houses. Dosan Seowon is another 30 kilometres upstream and pairs naturally with Hahoe on a single day. In the old city the Jjimdak Golmok off Andong Old Market is the source of jjimdak, the soy-braised chicken with glass noodles that began here in the 1980s and spread nationwide. The KTX-Eum from Seoul Cheongnyangni reaches Andong in about two hours.