1950s Korean Vintage Wallpaper — Donghwa (original / Provence)

Donghwa was found in a 1945 house in Heungwang-ri, Ganghwa Island (now Manisanbang) and dates to around 1945–early 1950s. Its color economy tells the story of the era immediately: black ink draws the overall forms and outlines, red ink prints the floral ornaments and background texture, and the unpainted surface of the base paper functions as a third tonal plane. No more ink than necessary — a structural response to the material scarcity of the years immediately after liberation. The underlying architecture is the Western-derived tile grid that entered Korea through Japanese colonial-era wallpaper: rectangular units arranged in a regular field, each holding a decorative motif inside its frame. But the flowers inside those frames are something else entirely. Where earlier wallpapers of this type achieved their motifs through rigorous geometric construction — as if drawn with ruler and compass — the blooms in Donghwa move with a looseness that recalls a brush held freely, slightly offhand, almost playful. GOSATE reads this as the trace of a specific historical rupture: when liberation came in 1945, the Japanese technicians who had supplied design templates left, and Korean craftspeople filled the gap with the only visual language they knew well — the informal, expressive, gently humorous sensibility of Joseon folk art. The Western tile grid, the inherited frame, stayed in place. What went inside it changed. GOSATE calls this tendency Joseon Deconstructivism: the imported structure maintained, its contents quietly dissolved and rebuilt in Korean terms. Read that way, the small freehand flowers in each red-dotted square are not a failure of precision but a form of authorship — a silent, unconscious record of design independence written into the first wallpapers Koreans made entirely for themselves. GOSATE’s reproduction digitally restores the original pattern, printed on premium non-woven base paper manufactured in Sweden. Available in two colorways: Original and Provence.   Roll size : 50cm by 10M Material : Non-woven paper Made in Sweden, Design in Korea