---
title: "Free Classes in Koreatown Teach Bojagi, the Korean Art of Wrapping in Cloth"
description: "The Pio Pico Koreatown Branch Library is running free bojagi workshops on Monday and again the following Monday. Both sessions are full, but there is a waitlist. Bojagi is the Korean practice of wrapping a gift in cloth that becomes part of the gift."
category: "Entertainment"
category_url: https://herald.la/category/entertainment
author: "Mei-Lin Tang"
published: 2026-07-19T13:29:36.000Z
updated: 2026-07-19T13:29:36.000Z
canonical: https://herald.la/article/free-classes-in-koreatown-teach-bojagi-the-korean-art-of-wrapping-in-cloth
tags: ["koreatown", "korean-culture", "textiles", "libraries", "free-events"]
---
# Free Classes in Koreatown Teach Bojagi, the Korean Art of Wrapping in Cloth

The Pio Pico Koreatown Branch Library is running free bojagi workshops on Monday and again the following Monday. Both sessions are full, but there is a waitlist. Bojagi is the Korean practice of wrapping a gift in cloth that becomes part of the gift.

The wrapping is not the packaging. That is the idea at the center of bojagi, and it is the part that takes a moment to land for anyone raised on wrapping paper that goes straight into the recycling.

A bojagi is a square of cloth used to wrap a gift, and it stays. The recipient keeps it, uses it again to wrap something else, or repurposes it. The wrapping is a second gift.

## The classes

The Los Angeles Public Library is hosting free bojagi workshops at its [Pio Pico Koreatown Branch](https://www.lapl.org/branches/pio-pico-koreatown), at 694 S. Oxford Ave., taught by the artist Ellen Lee, who runs the workshop practice Nossi.

[The sessions are on Mondays, July 20 and July 27](https://laist.com/news/los-angeles-activities/wrapping-a-gift-with-love-the-korean-way-learn-the-art-of-bojagi-for-free-in-la), and both are already full. The library is keeping a waitlist, and registration runs through the LAPL events calendar. Given how quickly these filled, the waitlist is worth joining rather than dismissing.

Lee describes the practice as carrying intention. "In Korea, people believe when you wrap something with bojagi, we really, truly believe we put our loving and caring heart in there too," she told LAist.

## What bojagi is

Bojagi is a long-established Korean textile tradition, with surviving examples dating to the Joseon period. It grew out of a belief that keeping something wrapped and protected was auspicious, and it developed into a form used across daily life and ceremony: wrapping gifts, covering and carrying food, bundling goods for a journey.

The tradition divides broadly into two lineages. Cloths made for the court were produced by professional artisans, often from single pieces of fine fabric with painted or embroidered decoration. The other lineage, and the one that shaped the form most people recognize, was domestic. Women pieced these cloths together from the fabric left over from sewing hanbok, assembling small irregular scraps into patchwork.

That origin explains why bojagi looks the way it does. The compositions that now read as strikingly modern, all asymmetric blocks and unexpected color relationships, came out of thrift rather than design theory. Embroidered cloths had specific ceremonial roles, including at betrothals and weddings.

Since the 1980s the form has been taken seriously as art rather than craft, collected by museums and drawn on by contemporary designers and textile artists.

## Why now

Part of the current interest is environmental. A cloth that is used indefinitely is an obvious answer to wrapping paper bought to be destroyed, and bojagi arrives at that answer without being designed as an eco-product.

Part of it is that Los Angeles is a reasonable place for this to take hold. The city has one of the largest Korean populations outside Korea, and Koreatown's branch library functions as a neighborhood cultural institution as much as a lending one, with Korean and Spanish materials and programming built around the community it sits in.

And part of it is simply that wrapping something carefully for someone is a pleasant way to spend an hour. The classes are free, the skill is portable, and the cloth outlasts the occasion.

## Sources

- [Wrapping a gift with love, the Korean way: learn the art of bojagi for free in LA](https://laist.com/news/los-angeles-activities/wrapping-a-gift-with-love-the-korean-way-learn-the-art-of-bojagi-for-free-in-la)
- [Pio Pico Koreatown Branch Library](https://www.lapl.org/branches/pio-pico-koreatown)