A Grandmother’s Handmade Mumyeongbe (Cotton Yarn)
This cloth woven with cotton yarn is called mumyeongbe. It was made by Duk-sang Kang's grandmother, Cha-bun Kim (1894-1979), who spun the cotton into yarn and wove it by hand loom.
Today the process has been mechanized, but at the time the process consisted of hard, manual labor. As the traditional nickname of “weaving woman” suggests, it was Korean women and their grandmothers who did the work.
There were many clothes made of mumyeongbe and sambe (hemp cloth), but it seems that the used clothes were destroyed when their owner died.
Cha-bun Kim traveled between Korea and Japan multiple times during the colonial period. She brought this mumyeongbe to Japan during a 1944 voyage. Because of its durability, it was used to make student and wartime uniforms. It survives to this day because it has been preserved as unprocessed cloth. It is a keepsake emblemizing the painstaking labor of first generation grandmothers.
