The Iconography of the Bent Body
Whom did a painter paint.
That question comes before what he saw.
This essay follows the people Byun Shi-Ji painted.
The times changed, and the places, and the clothes, and the grounds behind them.
Yet at the centre of every body he painted, the same question remains.
What does a person endure, in order to live?
1. The First Body Hid Its Face
We usually begin an account of Byun's figures with Woman in a Beret.
But another body lies before it.
A nude, her head sunk deep between her knees.
The face cannot be seen.
Arms and legs are folded inward. The body does not open outward.
This is not a body to be looked at. Not a body displaying its beauty.
It is someone who has hidden inside her own body.
No name, no occupation, no age.
All that remains is the posture.
Where a portrait ordinarily declares a sitter's station through the face,
this nude, by erasing the face, shows something more elementary:
a tiredness that cannot lift the head; a solitude one can bear only by folding oneself away.
The body looks defeated. Yet it has not fallen.
It is sitting. It is holding.
Between her two knees she keeps the last of her warmth.
And he chose this picture as the face of his own exhibition
March 1953. Hankyu Department Store, Osaka. His third solo exhibition.
The picture on the cover of the announcement was this nude — No. 20 in the list of sixty, Nude.
A painter of twenty-seven chose, for the face of his exhibition, a body without a face.
The painting is now untraced.
From this point on, the bent body in Byun's work was never merely a form.
It was a way of standing before the world.
2. Japan — From the Body to the Face
Of the sixty works shown at the Hwashin retrospective of 1958 under the heading Works of the Japan Years, these are the figures.
| No. | Work | Year |
|---|---|---|
| 6 | FEMME | 1947 |
| 7 | Woman in a Beret | 1948 |
| 8 | Woman with a Mandolin | 1948 |
| 10 | Man with a Violin | 1949 |
| 12 | Woman with a Book | 1951 |
| 13 | Man with a Pipe | 1949 |
| 14 | Woman Sitting | 1949 |
| 17 | Figure (‘Nemo’) | 1951 |
| 18 | Portrait of Mr. K | 1952 |
| 24 | Portrait of Mr. A | 1954 |
| 26 | Three Nudes | 1956 |
There are no names.
A woman. A man. A woman with a mandolin. A man with a pipe.
Even the portraits are Mr. K and Mr. A.
The canvas
His canvases measure 110 × 83 cm — seven centimetres shorter, on each side, than a standard F50 (117 × 91).
In an oral history recorded in 2004 he explained why.
A standard F50 is a little longer, top and bottom. If you paint only the figure, an emptiness opens on either side.
It gets in the way, so people put a table behind the figure, or a vase of flowers — everyone does it.
But I thought: I am painting this person because the person is beautiful. Why bring in a table, a vase? It is meaningless.
So I cut the F50 down, to the size of one figure.
He did not strip away the background.
He made no room, from the outset, for anything but the person.
Behind Woman in a Beret there is only darkness; behind Woman with a Mandolin, only a green wall.
The silence moves into the face
The face in Woman in a Beret is turned toward us.
But it does not open. The mouth is closed; the eyes look inward rather than out.
The silence once held between two knees has moved into the face.
What the nude carried in her whole body, the Japan-period figures begin to carry in the eyes, the mouth, the set of the expression.
3. Seoul — Titles
On 15 November 1957, Byun Shi-Ji arrived at Gimpo by Northwest Airlines after being invited by Seoul National University.
The 1958 Hwashin retrospective list preserves portraits of university presidents, deans, a vice minister and educators: Shin Tae-hwan, Kwon Jung-hwi, Lee Yang-ha, Kim Seon-gi, Kim Yeon-gap, Byun Si-min, Lee Seung-hak, Park In-chul, Yun Il-seon and others. The titles survive even where the works have not been traced.
The following year, seven new portraits appear in the list.
| No. | As listed |
|---|---|
| 50 | Portrait of Dr. Y |
| 51–52 | Portrait of Dr. K |
| 53 | Dr. S |
| 54 | Dr. R |
| 55 | Dr. P |
| 56 | Mrs. K |
The names of those he painted from life survive.
Ten years lie between Woman in a Beret and Dr. S.
In those ten years his brush moved from the nameless to the named.
But the cause cannot be written
We cannot write that he left the university because he had to paint such portraits.
No document says so.
Three presidents, a dean and several professors sat for him.
One does not entrust one's face to a man one has driven out.
And the following year, Mapo High School sponsored his fifth solo exhibition.
Two facts stand together. The space between them is empty.
4. And in the Same Year
Three more works appear in the list.
| No. | Work | Year |
|---|---|---|
| 39 | Porter | 1958 |
| 41 | Cow and Two Men | 1958 |
| 44 | Woodsplit | 1958 |
In the year he painted the presidents, he also painted a man under a load.
The same hand, the same year.
Dr. Y and the porter stand side by side in one list.
The Porter — the body that joins the nude to the old man
What one sees first in the porter is not a face. It is the weight on his back.
The body tilts forward; neck and waist form a single curve.
He did not bend of his own will. Life pressed down on his back.
And still he is standing.
The nude with her head between her knees was a body folded inward.
The porter is a body that carries a load and walks on.
The two postures are alike.
The back is bent. The body speaks before the face.
And neither has fallen.
Of the sixty works, the contemporary press reproduced exactly one: the Porter.
That painting is now untraced. All that survives is the halftone from the newspaper page.
The painting is gone; the posture remained.
5. The Biwon — A Long Silence
In September 1958 he became a teacher at Mapo High School.
Through the 1960s he painted the Biwon — the Secret Garden behind Changdeokgung Palace, long closed to the public.
His brush grew fine. He painted each roof tile, each leaf.
For more than a decade he painted almost nothing else.
| Year | Kōfūkai | Work |
|---|---|---|
| 1965 | 51st | Bandoji Pond, Biwon |
| 1966 | 52nd | The Old Tree, Biwon |
| 1968 | 54th | Seungjaejeong Pavilion |
| 1969 | 55th | Jondeokjeong Pavilion |
| 1971 | 57th | Aeryeonjeong Pavilion (F100) |
But it was not pure nature
Aeryeonjeong. Jondeokjeong. Buyongjeong. Seungjaejeong.
These are the walks of kings.
Later he named it plainly.
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.
The years without people
No one appears in these pictures. But the trace of people remains.
An empty pavilion. A path no one walks. An old tree, a still pond.
These are surfaces that speak of an absent human being.
This period is not a break.
It is closer to a long silence.
While people were gone from the picture, his brush was preparing a deeper posture —
a way of painting the human being not as a face or a title,
but as a mode of existence.
And when that preparation was done, he gave up the splendid colour of the Biwon and turned toward Jeju.
6. Jeju — Losing the Face, Gaining the Posture
The paintings had gone ahead of him.
The colour
In 2005 he described how the colour came.
One day I was sitting on the shore, looking — and in the sunlight,
white things went past white, and turned yellow. I saw it happen.
If one had to name Jeju by a colour, what colour would it be?
It would be that yellow — that was the thought I began from.
And the colour leads to galjung-i: cloth dyed with the juice of unripe persimmons, worn because white soiled too easily.
A colour made by poverty.
Losing the face, gaining the posture
In Jeju the human figure returns.
An old man with a stick. A body bent under the wind. A figure beside a pony.
In Jeju the figure loses its face again.
And gains a posture.
In the wind the body leans; the stick grips the ground.
The head lowers, the shoulders draw inward.
He does not try to defeat the wind.
He lowers his body, and lets the wind pass.
This is not submission.
To insist on standing straight in Jeju may be to insist on breaking.
To survive, the body must lower itself, lean, and sway.
The bent old man he painted is not a man defeated by nature.
He is a man who has learned, in his body, how to live with it.
The body under a carrying-frame. The body with an axe.
7. Solitude Became Labour, and Labour Became Pungto
The nude hid inside her own body.
The porter took the weight of a life on his back.
The old man of Jeju received the wind with his whole body.
Solitude became labour, and labour became pungto.
If the nude was a body holding one person's sorrow, the old man of Jeju is more than one person.
He is the body of everyone who has lived on that island —
of poverty and storm, of history and silence, endured.
Where the face disappeared, the age came in.
The body becomes pungto
A sky and an earth the colour of dry grass. A pony and a crow. A leaning thatch roof, a leaning tree.
Among them, the human body takes the colour of the landscape.
The human being is no longer an object placed before the scene.
He becomes part of what the scene is made of.
The body has become pungto.
It took thirty years.
To come back to the nameless.
8. The Dignity He Painted
This lineage is not a descent from the high to the low.
He knew from the beginning.
In 1948, at twenty-three, he had already cut his canvas —
so that no table and no vase could enter.
"I am painting this person because the person is beautiful."
Whatever did not serve that beauty was unnecessary.
So this is not subtraction but choosing.
Not what shall I leave out, but what is most beautiful here — decide that first, keep it alone.
And the last thing he chose was a bent back in the wind.
When he was twenty-three, his teacher Terauchi Manjirō wrote:
The work of Ushiro is plain and substantial, and yet fresh — and pure.
One might say that no stain of technique is visible in it.
— recommendation for the first solo exhibition, 1949
"No stain of technique."
Not that he lacked technique. He had won the Kōfū Prize.
He would not display it.
9. Without Speaking
He never explained any of this.
Then, at seventy-eight, he spoke once.
Being battered by a storm; and being battered, after I came back to Korea, by the investigative agencies.
The resistance to that battering — the resistance became the storm…
Ordinarily no one knows.
— oral history, 2004
Ordinarily no one knows.
He let it stay unknown. He did not ask to be understood.
He painted instead.
A back bent before the wind is a posture of endurance.
It was a posture before nature, and a posture before his time.
At the beginning there was a nude with her face buried between her knees.
At the end, an old man leaning on a stick in the wind.
They are not two people.
They are one body, carried across a long span of years.
A body that had crouched inside its own grief
took the weight of the world on its back,
and walked at last into the great wind.
Byun Shi-Ji painted people all his life.
But what he left in the end was not a face.
It was the posture of a human being who bends and does not fall.
And it is the low dignity of a man who carried his age without speaking.
Statements of fact rest on original documents, contemporary press, and the recorded oral history.
No causal claim has been asserted without evidence.
Sources
- - List of sixty works, Works of the Japan Years (Hwashin retrospective pamphlet, 1958) — atelier collection
- - Terauchi Manjirō, recommendation for the first solo exhibition (1949)
- - Thirty-five Kōfūkai exhibition works, 42nd (1956) – 92nd (2006) — atelier collection
- - Woosung Byun Shi-Ji Art Collection, chronology, pp. 169–173
- - Oral History of Modern and Contemporary Korean Art, 2005: Byun Shi-Ji
Arts Council Korea · interviewer Lee In-beom · 307 pp.
Session 2 (the canvas) · Session 4 (the storm) · Session 5 (from the Biwon to Jeju) · Session 7 (the yellow)
On the quotations
The oral-history passages are excerpts, rendered as spoken. Copyright rests with Arts Council Korea;
they are quoted here for research and criticism.