Pyeongtaek
— — the city the river and the runway share.
Not only on a wall.
“The plain between the Anseong River and Asan Bay, where the rice paddies meet the cranes of Pyeongtaek Port and the long fences of Camp Humphreys. A quiet place that became loud, then quiet again at the edges. From the studio, we see the lines a city draws when freight, farmland, and a foreign garrison have to fit on the same map.
Pyeongtaek, 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.
Pyeongtaek is a city of about 570,000 in the southwest of Gyeonggi Province, about 70 kilometres south of Seoul on the Yellow Sea coast. It sits on the lower Anseong River and opens onto Asan Bay, where Pyeongtaek Port, opened in 1986, has grown into one of the country's top automobile-export terminals. The city centre lies on the old Gyeongbu rail line; the eastern flank now wraps around USAG Humphreys, the largest United States overseas military base. The Pyeongtaek Plain is one of Korea's historic rice baskets.
The bay is shallow and tidal, with one of the larger tidal ranges on the peninsula. Asan Lake, the freshwater impoundment behind the 1973 Asan Bay seawall, buffers irrigation for the rice plain and feeds a chain of parks along the dike road. The Anseong and Jinwi rivers meet near the city before draining into the bay. Boats are mostly working: oyster skiffs, coastal freighters, the long automobile carriers loading at the port. The light reads silver more often than blue, and a quiet haze sits over the water for much of the year.
The Pyeongtaek Lake (Asan Lake) Tourist Complex on the north shore has the family-day-out concentration: fountain, sculpture park, fishing piers. Jin Wi-myeon to the east keeps the older village texture. The Pyeongtaek Port observation deck reads the cranes. USAG Humphreys is not open to the public; the surrounding district of Anjeong-ri carries the visible American presence in restaurants and signage. KTX high-speed trains do not stop in the city; Seoul subway Line 1 runs directly to Pyeongtaek Station in about ninety minutes from Seoul Station.