How Korean Hanji Survived a Century of Erasure: The Hidden History of East Asia's Most Durable Paper

In September 2023, the Korean American Artist Collective opened an inaugural exhibition titled "Han" at Culture House, a repurposed 1886 church in Washington, D.C. Suspended from the ceiling of the gallery was Robert Choe-Henderson's "HANgang," a sprawling 21-by-13-foot installation constructed entirely of handmade paper. The material hanging in the gallery was not just an artistic medium, but a quiet, physical rebuke to a century of linguistic and cultural erasure. The paper is hanji, a millennia-old Korean tradition that produces some of the most durable sheets in the world, yet remains widely misunderstood and miscategorized in the global art market.[1][3]

For much of the 20th and 21st centuries, the Western art world has largely ignored the word hanji. Instead, museums, galleries, and archival conservators have defaulted to kozo—the Japanese word for mulberry—as a universal shorthand for all East Asian papermaking. This linguistic dominance is not an accident of translation or a mere academic oversight. As Choe-Henderson notes in a September 2026 essay for Hyperallergic, the terminology reflects a profound historical amnesia regarding the impact of imperial rule on marginalized craft traditions.[1]

"Every sheet of Korean hanji I make carries the same question," Choe-Henderson writes. "What does it mean to preserve a tradition without flattening the people who created it?" The answer is inextricably linked to the Japanese occupation of Korea between 1910 and 1945. During this 35-year period, the colonial government systematically suppressed the Korean language, replaced Korean names, and reorganized cultural identity to subordinate the peninsula to imperial authority. Language became one of the primary ways the empire reorganized identity itself.[1]

The papermaking industry was a direct target of this cultural project. Traditional Korean papermaking methods were forcibly replaced by Japanese techniques, and strict regulations were imposed by the colonial government to control Korean mulberry farms and manufacturers. The distinct cultural inheritance of hanji was absorbed into the broader category of Japanese papermaking, and the word kozo became the default category through which all East Asian paper became legible to the outside world, effectively erasing the Korean artisans from their own history.[1]

The tragedy of this erasure is compounded by the extraordinary physical properties of the material itself, which differs significantly from its Japanese counterparts. Often referred to historically as baekji—a term meaning "white paper" or "hundred paper"—hanji requires 99 distinct touches by the maker and one final touch by the user to be considered complete. The labor-intensive process begins with the inner bark of the cham dak, or paper mulberry tree, which is harvested exclusively between November and February before the fibers stiffen.[2]

Once the bark is stripped and boiled, artisans mix the pulp with a crucial natural formation aid: the mucilage that oozes from the roots of the Abelmoschus manihot, a type of hibiscus. This viscous substance suspends the individual fibers in water, allowing the papermaker to employ a unique sheet formation technique known as webal-ddeugi. Unlike standard papermaking, which pulls fibers in a single direction, webal-ddeugi layers the fibers at crisscrossing angles to create a multi-directional grain that reinforces the material's structural integrity.[2]

This crisscrossing formation yields a sheet so tear-resistant and dimensionally stable that it bends without breaking. A traditional Korean proverb states that while silk lasts 500 years, hanji lasts 1,000 years. This is not an exaggeration: the Pure Light Dharani Sutra, a Buddhist text printed on hanji around 704 CE, remains intact today as the world's oldest surviving woodblock print, bearing the original papermaker's name and demonstrating the unparalleled archival longevity of the cham dak fibers when treated with the hibiscus root mucilage.[2]

Because of its extreme durability, historical applications for hanji extended far beyond writing and painting. During the Joseon Dynasty, which ruled the peninsula from 1392 to 1910, Koreans oiled the paper to make it translucent and waterproof, pairing it with ondol underfloor heating systems to create the world's first active greenhouses. The paper insulated the structures while allowing sunlight to penetrate, a feat of agricultural engineering reliant entirely on the strength of the sheets to withstand wind, rain, and winter temperatures.[2]

The material was also woven into three-dimensional objects through a cording technique known as jiseung. Artisans twisted strips of hanji into tight cords to weave baskets, vessels, and even watertight chamber pots used by brides traveling long distances to their new homes. When heavily layered and treated with lacquer, the paper was manufactured into jigap—armor capable of stopping arrows and swords, as well as insulated ammunition pouches for troops facing harsh winters on the mountainous Korean peninsula.[2]

Today, a new generation of diaspora artists is aggressively reclaiming both the physical tradition and the terminology. Collaborative projects like the 2021 Hanji Edition portfolio have brought together international printmakers and book artists to create experimental works using paper produced at Jangjibang, a traditional hanji mill in South Korea. These artists are actively challenging the Japanese-dominated narratives that have governed American papermaking for decades, organizing exhibitions and publishing scholarship to re-educate the public on the origins of their medium.[4]

The revival is not simply about preserving an ancient craft; it is about correcting the historical record. By insisting on the term hanji rather than accepting kozo, artists are refusing to let one tradition speak on behalf of another. They are demanding linguistic and botanical precision from an art world that has long been comfortable with the flattening effects of colonial legacy, forcing curators and conservators to update their catalogs and acknowledge the specific origins of the materials they display.[1][5]

As the art world slowly updates its lexicons, the survival of hanji offers a blueprint for how marginalized cultures can recover traditions erased by occupation. The material that was once engineered to stop arrows and insulate homes is now proving durable enough to outlast the empire that tried to erase it, carrying the memory of its makers into a new century and ensuring that the 99 touches of the baekji process are not lost to the convenience of a universal shorthand.[1][5]