Exile and Blessing

'I am painting this person because the person is beautiful' — that opening clause is the whole of it.

The table and the vase are only examples. What he names is the unnecessary: 'if the thing made it more beautiful, well and good' — whatever does not serve the beauty is unnecessary.

This is not subtraction. It is choosing.

Not 'what shall I leave out', but 'what is most beautiful here' — decide that first, keep it alone, and the rest falls away of itself.

That is why he cut the canvas. The picture did not shrink after everything had been removed. He cut the canvas to the size of the one beautiful thing.

The order is the reverse.

His canvases measure 110 × 83 cm — seven centimetres shorter, on each side, than the standard F50. He cut the canvas, had new stretchers built, and had the frames made to match.

The following year his teacher wrote: 'One might say that no stain of technique is visible in it.'

We have read his emptiness as a space left blank. It is not. It is what remains once the one beautiful thing has been chosen. Not empty — left over from choosing.

And it was not born in Jeju. It began in 1948, when he ordered a canvas.

This is the heaviest passage in the archive.

We have read his storms as the weather of Jeju. That is true. But the painter himself names another meaning.

In the fourth session, the sections Under government surveillance and Caught in the schemes of the intelligence services are followed directly by Giving form to the storm. Only here does he say what happened to him in Seoul.

'Ordinarily no one knows.'

He never explained it. He painted it.

This is the moment the colour was born.

It did not come from a theory. He was sitting on a beach and he saw it — the sun so strong that white went past white into yellow.

And the colour leads to galjung-i: cloth dyed with the juice of unripe persimmons, worn by the people of Jeju because white soiled too easily. A colour made by poverty.

He did not give up only the colour. He gave up the manner of the Biwon.

'The Biwon manner is an aristocratic culture. Not a common one. … Jeju is the very bottom of common life. Such hardship. And so I threw away all of that elegant, splendid colour.'

He called the garden he had painted for ten years an aristocratic culture. And he left it.

This is why almost no works survive from 1975–76.

At fifty he threw away everything: the colour, the technique, even the stretcher itself. He cut the cloth with scissors, painted, and if it failed he wiped it out where he stood.

And the scene rhymes with 1948.

At twenty-three he cut down the F50. At fifty he abandoned the frame altogether.

Twenty-seven years apart, the same hand is doing the same thing: cutting away what does not fit.