구술채록Byun Shi-ji Oral History Transcript (2004–2005)

Byun Shiji was born on the 29th day of the fifth lunar month, 1926, in Seohong-dong, Seogwipo, Jeju — the fourth of nine children. Around age five he tagged along with his older brothers to a village Confucian school , grinding ink to practice writing the character 一 on a blackened wooden board. He recalled the bier-house by the stream on the way to school, an orchard the boys tried to raid, a piglet that died when he tied a rope around its neck to drag it out for play, and riding an unsaddled pony to his grandfather's house — the ride left him raw-skinned, treated afterward with cat fur in place of medicine.

At six, he crossed to Japan with his father. His clearest early memory is boarding the large ship anchored off Seogwipo. Arriving in Osaka, he recalled, "the smell was different — the smell of civilization."

In Osaka he attended elementary school, the only Korean among the entire student body. Because his name was then written "Byun Shi-gun (邊時君)," Japanese teachers — following custom — addressed him with "-gun" appended to his surname, making him "Shigun-gun," a target for schoolyard mockery. He refused to attend school until his father had his family register amended and his name changed to "Shiji (時志)" — chosen, he says, because its stroke count matched that of "gun."

He excelled athletically. He recalled winning event after event at the school sports day, prizes carried home by taxi, and defeating opponents several grades above him in wrestling matches at a local festival — until a leg-sweep throw injured his knee joint. There was no pain, only a slight limp for the first few steps after sitting. His parents took him through a succession of Osaka hospitals and folk remedies — standing under a waterfall, a shamanic ritual, forceful massage — before an infection set in and he underwent surgery at the Red Cross Hospital. "Once a joint is damaged that way," he said, "it never fully recovers."

Unable to run and play as before, he turned to reading novels, and briefly dreamed of becoming a novelist, until he realized novelists needed to "live through real experience," which he felt he could not do. He turned to painting instead. Around age twelve or thirteen, he begged his family to buy him a boxed set of oil paints displayed in a department store window, and began painting in oils.

In 1942 he entered the Western Painting Department of the Osaka School of Fine Arts, whose entrance exam consisted only of plaster-cast drawing, watercolor, and Chinese classics — about a year of preparation. The school sat in a quiet spot between Osaka and Kyoto, little more than a hill and a temple. Its principal was Yano Kyōsei, and among its professors were Sonobe Shin and Saitō Yori. As the war intensified, classes were often disrupted; a notice arrived for him too, but he judged that returning to Korea, where his language was weak, offered little advantage, and simply kept the notice on hand rather than reporting.

He was keenly aware of the gap in standards between Osaka, Tokyo, and Seoul: in Tokyo, a student submitting to open competitions was considered presumptuous, while in Osaka older students did so freely; Seoul lagged far behind both.

Looking back on this period, he offered a striking contrast: "If the image of that environment from my childhood in Seogwipo remains in full color, the image from my childhood in Japan remains in gray." Jeju stayed with him in warm light and color; Japan, in the gray of wartime, hardship, and — once — the sight of people swept away and tumbling in a flooded street.

The Tokyo years began with a chance encounter. In the spring following the end of the war, Byun Shiji recognized the painter Terauchi Manjirō — whom he knew only from photographs — on a bus, and spoke to him: "Might you be Mr. Terauchi?" Discipleship began from there. Japanese apprenticeship differed from the Korean model: rather than direct instruction in a studio, a student brought finished work to the master for critique, then took it home to revise and return. He recalled being turned back so many times that he abandoned plans to submit to the spring exhibition that first year.

The teaching that stayed with him most was Impressionist color theory — how light reflecting off objects causes colors to influence one another, and how classical painters rendered shadow in black while Impressionists rendered it in blue. He put the principle into practice himself: "I eliminated black from my palette entirely." This became the root of a color philosophy that stayed with him for the rest of his life.

He also recounted an episode from the studio gathering. When a senior fellow disciple, Fujimoto Tōichirō, began to offer a few critical remarks on his work, Terauchi cut him off: "Iran koto iwana" ("Don't say unnecessary things"). His pen name, Woosung (宇城, "walled castle"), derived from the fact that his home village was enclosed by a wall like a fortress. At the jurying for his first Nitten selection, Terauchi reportedly asked fellow juror Saitō Yori what he thought of the painting; the answer came back, "If we recognize this painting, the works of Japan's great masters are in danger" — an anecdote Byun recounted with evident pride.

In 1948, he won the top prize at the 34th Kōfū-kai exhibition and became a full member — the only Korean to do so.

Of his decision to return to Korea, he spoke plainly: an invitation to teach at Seoul National University meant, however chaotic the society, that "a salary would come in, and if I could get by, couldn't I still paint?" — that was the whole of his reasoning. His remark, "I came because I didn't know," carries the weight of later regret. He married soon after returning, and once children came, he had to set aside his long-held dream of studying in Paris — a dream only realized belatedly, in 1981, on his first trip to Europe.

At the close of this session he also briefly touches on the origin of the style that would later be called the "Biwon School." Searching for a distinctly Korean subject after his return, he arrived at the old royal palaces, rendering each leaf with a fine brush to build depth into the canvas. But this, he notes, "was neither the Kōfū-kai style, nor my teacher's teaching" — an independent path already germinating, he recalled, on the foundation of his Tokyo-era training.

A review in a Japanese newspaper, published during his run of solo exhibitions in Tokyo, redirected the course of his life. After distinguishing what in his work reflected Terauchi Manjirō's influence from what expressed his own individuality, the piece closed with a line that stayed with him: "this artist is, by constitution, different from us." He took the remark to mean a difference of blood — of nation. If that were so, he reasoned, then living in Korea, immersed in its life, its climate, its history, and coming to know it fully, might allow him to paint something more distinctly Korean — a work bearing his own individuality and character. Around this time an invitation arrived to teach at Seoul National University. His reasoning for returning was simple: "If my livelihood is secure, I can still do my work."

An episode from his Tokyo years illustrates his working aesthetic. After the day's work, painters gathered at a café for tea, then moved on to drink and talk about art late into the night — what makes something beautiful? Debates converged, again and again, on a single conclusion: beauty comes from simplicity, from stripping away the unnecessary. He put this into practice directly. The standard exhibition submission size of 50-ho left empty space around a single figure, and most painters filled it with a table or a potted plant. He judged this "entirely unnecessary," and instead cut the canvas's proportions so it held only the figure — the first trace, in effect, of the radical paring-down he would later carry to its extreme in his Jeju-period work.

His Tokyo-era paintings are marked by a distinctively thick matière, built up in successive layers of oil paint. He described this as a property unique to oil — the ability to "dig further and further into the surface of the painting." He agreed with an assessment made around this time that while his figure painting bore his teacher's clear influence, his landscape work showed him charting an independent path of his own.

A vivid episode marks his path to the Kōfū-kai's top prize. Lying down before a painting in progress in Terauchi's studio, he fell asleep and dreamed of a creature — wrestler-bodied, with huge eyes — pressing down on his chest and asking, "Shall I teach you what beauty is?" He woke with a start and, that same night — though he otherwise never touched oil paint under electric light — took up his brush and reworked the canvas. Terauchi's verdict the next day was simply, "It's done." That work earned him his first Kōfū-kai selection. As a first-time exhibitor, an award was withheld that year; the following year, he won the top prize at the Kōfū-kai's 34th exhibition. He returned to Korea carrying a letter of recommendation Terauchi had written for him by hand — the original of which still survives.

In 1959, the year after his return, he held his second solo exhibition — Recent Works. Where his first exhibition had been largely a retrospective of works brought from Japan, this one consisted of some twenty-five to thirty new works painted in Korea, chiefly depicting the red-brick buildings and scenery around Seoul National University. He recounted an attempt to paint sunrise at Haeundae Beach: the first morning, the sun had fully risen by the time he finished mixing paint on his palette, and he lost the moment; the next day he prepared palette and canvas in advance and captured the sunrise the instant it appeared. Around this time he also began painting portraits, traveling to sitters' homes to work directly from life.

In February 1960 he became head of a fine arts department at a Seoul arts college. Finding student attendance extremely poor, he had the registrar's office institute attendance tracking, so that missing more than two-thirds of class sessions would bar promotion or graduation. He also worked to build up the faculty, assembling — by his own account — one of the strongest teaching staffs in Seoul at the time.

He recounted at length an episode surrounding an international art exhibition held in 1962. When Japanese painters hesitated to send work to Korea, his fellow disciple from Terauchi's studio, Fujimoto Tōichirō, vouched for the venture: "If Byun Shiji is exhibiting, it can be trusted." On that assurance, works by Watanabe Takeo and other Japanese artists were sent to Korea. The exhibition was delayed and the works sat for months in storage, where frames rotted and mildew set in before they were returned — a mishap he recounts, but one that also illustrates the degree of trust he had earned across the Japan–Korea art world, trust substantial enough to underwrite an international exchange.

In the early 1960s, when the rear garden of Changdeokgung Palace (Biwon) opened to the public for the first time, he began visiting almost daily. Together with a small circle of fellow painters who worked there nearly every day, he came to be associated with what was called the "Biwon School." One of these companions, who had received no formal art training, effectively learned to paint by working alongside the group at Biwon, later winning selections at the national exhibition. The meticulous style of this period — rendering each leaf of the old palace grounds in fine brushwork — was the fruit of a search for Korean subject matter built on the technical foundation he had laid down in Tokyo.

Around 1970, he set out to build Korea's first privately founded art museum. Noting that individual artists' museums were not uncommon in Japan or the West but that none existed in Korea, he purchased a building near Miari Pass in Seoul and began converting it into what he called "Byun Shiji's House of the Painter." The project was left unfinished when he fell ill and was hospitalized during construction; later, a road-widening project reduced the building to a third of its original size, and its purpose shifted to housing archival materials.

What drew him to Jeju was a memory from his years at Seoul National University: Jeju-born students, when asked where they were from, would answer with visible embarrassment. Seeing this, he came to believe that a proper art museum on Jeju could ease that sense of shame. Gidang Art Museum, opened in 1987, became Korea's first municipal art museum. He wrote to painters asking for donated works; most initially declined, but individual negotiations eventually gathered some 600 pieces. By his account, this achievement spurred other regions to build their own municipal museums in the years that followed.

The founding of the Oriental Art Association rested on a clear theory of technique. He held that oil paint had originally developed to render Western-style architecture and suited broad, heavy brushwork. But rendering Asian subjects — the pavilions and curved roofs of Biwon — called for a finer touch, and he set out to achieve, with Western pigment, a delicacy exceeding that of traditional ink painting. The attempt earned him the reputation of painting "more finely than ink painting itself," and he recalled that within a few years it began to influence painters working in the traditional medium as well. Being far from Tokyo — beyond the hierarchies of master and disciple — is, he suggested, precisely what made such bold experimentation possible.

On teaching children's art, largely to his own students, he held a distinct view. Watching students of natural talent render anything set before them, he found himself troubled rather than impressed — what comes too easily carries no depth of feeling. His remark, "Art must never compromise with money, power, or fame," grew from watching painting turn, before his eyes, into mere merchandise.

Returning to Jeju in 1975, he met despair. The mature technique he had built at Biwon now had to be abandoned. At first he painted Jeju scenes in the same Biwon manner and sent them to a Japanese gallery as before, but he soon judged, "this is not it." His conclusion: "When the pungto differs, the style and idea of a painting must differ too." Rather than working within standard canvas dimensions, he began cutting canvas freely with scissors, searching for new form, discarding on the spot any painting that failed to satisfy him. The result was the end of his exclusive contract with the Japanese gallery — its dealer, bewildered by the new style, asked, "What school does this belong to?" and eventually settled the matter with a parting remark: "Take this for your drink." It meant giving up a stable income, a choice made possible only because of the financial footing he had already secured in Seoul.

In 1977 he arrived, finally, at the idea of casting the whole canvas in a single yellow tone — sea and earth alike rendered in yellow. He took this discovery as having found "something truly of Jeju." It was the first moment he felt, "yes, this is it," and the exhibition built on this new style met with strong response. Since his Biwon years he had sought to paint not merely what the eye could see but the time layered beneath it — of an ancient tree at Biwon he once said, "that tree knows five hundred years of the Joseon dynasty's history." In Jeju, too, he sought to carry, beyond formal beauty alone, the long will and the traces of a life lived by islanders who endured wind and storm.

Back in Jeju, he held a clear view on the beauty of the island's original landscape. Development, he believed, layers the human hand atop nature as a primary resource, producing a kind of "second nature" — not something to be rejected outright, but something that ought to proceed by preserving Jeju's original character rather than erasing it. He opposed paving roads or raising buildings hard against the shoreline, and argued in various forums that the island's stone field-walls possessed a beauty of world-class quality that deserved preservation. The sea off Incheon and the sea off Jeju share the single name "sea," he reasoned, yet hold entirely different kinds of beauty — and only by feeling that difference could development proceed responsibly. When tourists later toured his permanent gallery and remarked, "seeing these paintings helps me understand Jeju," he took it as a sign that his work had become, however belatedly, a means of awakening others to that beauty.

He held a clear answer to what makes a painting "of Jeju." A tourist who visits, finds it beautiful, and paints it before leaving produces something "Jeju only on the surface," he said. Only what rises from having actually lived there, from the ground up, allows pungto to become the true matrix of art. Pungto, in his understanding, was never merely the natural environment; it included history and a whole way of life. Because pungto differs from region to region, the form and style of the painting that emerges from it must differ too — a conviction he held consistently throughout his career.

His book Art and Pungto was not written as a single work but accumulated from notes kept over years of lecturing. The essay that shares its title was first published in a magazine in 1958 or 1959, before he had even returned from Japan — meaning his resolve to go home and paint within his own pungto was already present at that time. The rest of the book, he explained, was distilled from a wide reading of aesthetics texts, keeping only what a working painter genuinely needs: an answer to the questions of what beauty is, and what art is.

In Jeju he also took up ink-wash painting. He described starting it with no plan at all — almost in a spirit of "I don't know, let's see" — picking up the brush on days without classes, simply wanting release from the constraints of oil technique. There was some apprehension about a Western-style painter holding an ink-painting exhibition in a region long associated with the traditional medium, but the show was well received. His work in ceramic painting likewise began at an outside suggestion — he spent a week at a kiln and produced some seventy pieces. After 1977 his pace of production increased markedly. Completing works in the 1- to 10-ho range took the longest at first, but once his style was established, works of 30-ho and even 100-ho came far more readily, he recalled.

On his first trip to Europe in 1981, the French he had studied as a student proved unexpectedly useful. While his companions, blocked by the language barrier, gave up sketching altogether, he found his own way through the streets and painted every day. Touring European galleries and museums, placing his Jeju paintings mentally alongside the masterworks he saw there, gave him a confidence that carried into a burst of productivity in the years that followed.

Asked why an artist's style must keep changing, he answered by describing the whole arc of a painter's growth. Anyone setting out to become an artist strives, at first, to paint like the world's great masters — and upon reaching that level comes to realize the work is "someone else's painting, not my own." Most stop there, content with that achievement; but to find something truly one's own requires wandering through territory with no guide and no textbook, he said. He himself had, even while gaining recognition in an established style, quietly attempted work in his own idiom — work that went unrecognized for a long time. It was a Japanese newspaper's review, calling him "by constitution different" from his peers, that crystallized his resolve: to break free of his teacher's style, he would have to live within the pungto and history of the land where he was born.

Change came at a cost. Moving from Tokyo to Seoul, he lived for a time in a single room off a kitchen with nothing but bedding, and recalled the feeling of "heaven and earth pressed flat together." The despair he felt upon moving to Jeju was no different — each time his surroundings shifted by a full hundred and eighty degrees, the shock drove him deeper into his work, and that intensity became a force embedded in the paintings themselves. "An artist," he said, "is fated to live in such conditions."

In Seoul he experimented briefly with Western-style abstraction before recognizing it was not his path. Abstraction, he reasoned, arises from resistance to a highly developed mechanized civilization — a resistance Korea, which had not yet experienced either the benefits or the pressures of such a civilization, had no grounds to express authentically. Simply imitating foreign abstraction, he felt, would have been no better than staying in Japan. He concluded instead that Korea's own pungto and history were, in themselves, already a form of abstraction. Searching for what might rise from that ground, he arrived at the old royal garden — where an ancient tree seemed to him to hold within it five hundred years of the Joseon dynasty's history.

His working method followed clear principles. Once his style was established, he worked without preliminary drawing or sketching, committing what he saw to memory and transferring it directly to canvas. A single work took a week to ten days: if it satisfied him within that span, it was finished; if not, he erased it on the spot. This stood in sharp contrast to his earlier practice — his Biwon-period paintings, built up leaf by leaf, tile by tile, then glazed in successive thin layers of color, could take nearly a month to complete a single 10-ho canvas. He deliberately avoided working from photographs, believing the practice erodes an artist's imagination; only what was observed and internalized directly on site, he believed, could produce genuine realism. In later years, as declining health left him fewer stretches of sustained concentration, he shifted toward a slower, more deliberate approach — reasoning that neither speed nor duration alone determines the worth of a work.

Much of Jeju's old landscape has already given way to a human-touched "second nature," he said, but encountering even a single surviving old tree, one remaining trace of the old atmosphere, is enough to revive the whole vanished scene in his mind. This is what he called a "landscape of the mind" — not the visible nature of the present, but a landscape reconstituted from long observation and memory.

He also gave a clear account of the recurring figures and forms in his paintings — human figures, crows. What began as small "typological figures" added merely to complete a composition gradually became, over time, the true subject commanding the entire canvas. A crow might occupy no more than a hundredth of the picture's surface, he said, yet it becomes the force that carries the whole.

He closed by returning to Jeju's stone walls to sum up what pungto meant to him. The gaps deliberately left between stones, allowing wind to pass through so the wall would not collapse, were both a practical wisdom and a form of beauty — one not easily seen by the ordinary eye, but essential to preserve if a place is to remain unlike anywhere else. Only by holding onto pungto, he said, can the people who live within it — and the scholarship and art that grow from that ground — truly become something new.