1940s Korean Vintage Wallpaper — Nami (original)

Nami dates to 1943, found in an early 1940s house near Byeongyeongseong Fortress in Gangjin County, South Jeolla Province. Its design belongs to the spot floral tradition that developed in French and British wallpaper markets from the late nineteenth century onward: small bouquet medallions placed at regular intervals across the surface, conceived less as a large-scale pictorial pattern than as something closer to a woven textile repeat. The technical grammar follows accordingly. Rather than heavy outlines, the flowers and leaves are built from dense stippling — countless tiny dots and broken lines that simulate the warp and weft of cloth, the pile of embroidery, the sheen of silk — turning a printed paper into something that addresses the sense of touch as much as sight. What sets the 1943 Nami apart is its final layer: silver pigment (은분, 銀粉) applied over the bouquet backgrounds and ground stripes after the green ink layers had already established the forms. The interior of each floral motif is rendered in a pixelated pointillist technique — the boundary between flower and leaf dissolves into a scatter of dots rather than a clean edge — and the silver coat over the ground makes those edges shimmer under light, blurring the distinction between print and metalwork. The effect GOSATE describes is that of metallic embroidery reproduced in ink: a paper wall that reads at distance as brocade. That this level of technical ambition was applied in 1943, at the height of wartime material shortages, is itself a historical statement. The scale of the pattern was reduced to suit the intimate proportions of a Korean urban hanok room, but the density of the craft was not reduced at all. In the narrow rooms of a colonial-era house near a provincial fortress, someone was determined that their walls would have a quality finish. GOSATE’s reproduction digitally restores the original pattern, printed on premium non-woven base paper manufactured in Sweden. Available in one colorway: Original.   Roll size : 50cm by 10M Material : Non-woven paper Made in Sweden, Designed in Korea