When Fūdo Begets Form

1. The Hill

An old man stands on a hill.
A horse is beside him.
The sea is far. The wind is near.

The surface is the color of dried grass.
A few black lines pass across it.
Near the horizon a small boat floats.

There is no telling where the old man is looking.
His head is bowed a little.
His stick rests on the ground.

The horse wears no bridle.
It is not tied, and it does not leave.
Man and animal stand in the same wind.

A crow passes low.
No cry is heard.

More of the surface is unpainted than painted.
There are no clouds.
No house, no road.

What is absent makes the surface wide.

Before this painting people mostly ask the same things.
What is that color.
Why is it so empty.

I want to ask something else.

Why did this painting come only from here.

2. The Question

Look at the world's paintings long enough and one thing catches.

Some paintings could have been made anywhere.
Some could not have come from anywhere but that land.

Not a matter of technique.
Not of talent either.

Turner's light came from the damp of England.
That light erases outlines.
When there is water in the air, the edges of distant things loosen.

Levitan's horizon came from the breadth of Russia.
Where the land goes on without end, the ratio of sky to ground changes.
People grow small and lines grow long.

O'Keeffe's bones and sky came from the dryness of New Mexico.
Without moisture, color does not blur.
Edges stay knife-sharp.

Kiefer's surface is heavy.
The soil and ash of a land the war passed through have come up into it.

Sesshū's void is not empty.
In a land of much fog, what cannot be seen is also real.

Bada Shanren's bird is almost not there on the paper.
It sits in a few points of ink.
It is a void painted by a subject of a fallen country.

Tamayo's red is dark and deep.
The earth and sun of Mexico are inside it.

Emily Carr's forest rises.
That is how the conifer forest of a rainy coast grows.

Call this local color and the explanation ends there.
But it does not end.

Local color is a matter of subject.
It means the things of that land were painted.
Paint a palm and it is the south. Paint a birch and it is the north.

Subject can be moved.
A palm can be painted in a Paris studio.

What I mean is not subject.
It is form.

The angle at which the brush meets the surface.
Where a line is broken off.
What is left empty.
Where the horizon is placed.

These are hard to move.
The body of someone who has lived long in that land decides them.

A body does not change by learning.
It changes by enduring.

3. The Word Fūdo

風土, fūdo, is the title of a book published in 1935 by the Japanese philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō.

He did not use the word for climate or geography.

Climate is outside.
It can be measured in temperature and humidity.
Fūdo cannot be measured that way.

Fūdo is the place where a person discovers himself.

In cold, a person discovers the self that knows cold.
In wind, a person discovers the self that endures wind.

The moment one feels cold, the cold is no longer outside.
It has come inside that person.

Watsuji divided the world into three.
The monsoon, rainy and humid.
The desert, dry and hot.
The meadow, mild and regular.

The person of the monsoon endures.
Nature gives and takes away, so one accepts rather than opposes.

The person of the desert opposes.
The person of the meadow believes nature can be governed.

There is no need to accept this division as it stands.
It is too simple, and it carries the limits of its time.

But one thing remains.

The thought that land shapes a person's attitude.
And that the attitude comes out as form.

Heidegger arrived somewhere similar from another direction.

He did not separate building from dwelling.
A person does not build in order to live. A person lives in the way he builds.

Lay one bridge and the two sides of a river become this side and that side for the first time.
A relation that did not exist comes into being.
Building changes dwelling.

Deleuze used another word.
Territorialization.

A bird marks its place with a song.
Because of the song, the place becomes a territory.
Art does the same, he said.

The words of the three men differ.
Their philosophical lineages differ, and so do their times.

But they point one direction.

A person does not live on the land.
A person is with the land.

One thing should be stated here.

Reading a Korean painter through the concept of a Japanese philosopher requires care.
The concept must not cover the painting.

This book does not use fūdo as a frame.
It uses it as a word.

The painting came first.
It needed only a word to be called by.
There was no fitting word, so one was borrowed.

Since it is borrowed, it can be set down at any time.
The painting remains.

In Korean, pungto is commonly used to mean atmosphere.
It is the word in phrases like the climate of a discipline.

The fūdo used in this book is not that word.
It is fūdo as the place where a person discovers himself.

So the word is not rendered as regionalism, nor as local color.
The moment it is, the meaning narrows.

Regionalism is the claim of the periphery against the center.
Fūdo is not a claim.
It is a condition.

4. Not a Background

The word landscape holds a trap.

The thought that a background is there first and a person stands in front of it.
The thought that there is a stage and the acting happens upon it.

Fūdo is not a stage.

Where the wind is strong, trees lie down.
Lying down is the form of the tree.
Wind is not the background of the tree but its form.

The trees of Jeju grow to one side.
The branches on the windward side cannot grow.
The tree records the direction of the wind with its own body.

Houses too.
The thatched houses of Jeju are low.
The roofs are tied down and pressed with straw rope.

The stone walls are full of holes.
They let the wind pass through the gaps.
They do not block it. They let it through.

There are two ways of enduring.
Holding out, and letting through.
The island learned the second.

People are the same.
Someone who has lived long where the wind is strong walks differently.
The shoulders differ, and the angle of the head differs.

Paintings are the same.

In Byun Shi-Ji's pictures the figure is often bent.
The back curves and the head is lowered.

To read this only as posture is half of it.

That bending is the shape of the wind.
The wind is not painted.
The body of the person stands in the place of the wind.

The background has entered as form.

The bent body is old in his painting.

It is already in the nude study of 1945.
It is in the last painting of 2013.
The same curve continued for sixty-eight years.

Only the meaning changed.

At first it was the body of labor.
The body bearing a load, the working body, was bent.
The Tokyo studies and Femme are such.

In Seoul the carrier with his A-frame and the man splitting wood took that place.

In Jeju it became the horseman, the diving woman, the farmer.

Then the old man appears.

The old man's body carries no load.
And still it is bent.

It is the body of endurance.

Toward the late years the head bows lower.
That bowing is not fatigue.
It is closer to a rite of respect. 禮

This is interpretation.
There is no record of the painter saying so.

Only that the painting moved in one direction for sixty-eight years.

5. How Far Does Fūdo Reach

Here the range must be settled.

See fūdo only as climate and it is narrow.

Rain and wind and sun.
There are paintings not explained by those alone.

There is a child who grew up on ruins.

Grow up in a world where the collapsed is normal and one learns the intact later.

To that child ruins are not background.
They are the first world seen.

Nature makes wind and people make ruins.

But for a child there is no division.
Both were simply there.

So war too becomes fūdo.

When a generation is born and grows up on it, that is what it becomes.

One more is added.

A place many cultures have passed through also becomes fūdo.

There are places where buildings of several ages stand in one city.
There are places where ornament that makes no human figure stands beside the carving of a cathedral.

In the body of one who grew up in such a land there is more than one grammar.

It is not known by learning.
You just come to know it.

Then this question comes.

Is illness fūdo.
Is the death of a family fūdo.

Here we have to stop.

If everything becomes fūdo, fūdo explains nothing.

So a line is drawn.

Fūdo is what many undergo together.

The wind strikes every islander.
A war is passed through by a generation together.

When many undergo the same thing, a common form comes out of it.

What one person undergoes is different.

Losing a mother is the affair of that household.
It is not the affair of everyone in a country.

That is not fūdo.

It is biography.

Fūdo and biography are not the same.

This distinction protects this book.

Without it the proposition grows large, and a proposition grown large reaches nowhere.

This widening is needed for reading Jeju as well.

Wind alone does not read all of it.

There was wind on the island, and there was something else.

There are those who did not return.

That too is something many underwent together.

So that too is fūdo.

6. Why Beget

The verb in the title of this book is beget.
It is not changed to make.

Making is done by the hand.
Begetting is done by the body.

The maker knows beforehand what will be made.
There is a design and there are tools.
When it is finished, the maker and the made are separated.

The one who begets does not know.
Does not know what will come.
And after the begetting the two do not wholly come apart.

To say that fūdo makes form is to say the land holds a blueprint.
It does not.

The land does not design.
It only makes one endure a long time.
Form comes out of the body that has endured.

Begetting takes time.
It also hurts.
And what is begotten resembles the one who begot it, but is not that person.

There is one more thing.

What is made can be made again.
What is begotten cannot be begotten again.

Even in the same fūdo, the same painting does not come twice.

So this book does not call fūdo a cause.
It calls it a condition.

A cause determines a result.
A condition only makes it possible.

Beget is the word that stands between.
It did not come from nothing, and it did not come as decided.

Byun Shi-Ji did not paint Jeju.
What a body that endured long in Jeju painted is what we call Jeju.

7. Five Gates

This book passes through five gates.

Color.

The light of a land sets the palette.
The color of a humid place and the color of a dry place are not the same.

Northern color runs low and toward gray.
Southern color runs high and toward the primary.

Color is not taste.
It is the result of what the eye has seen for a long time.

There is time inside color.
A color seen once is not yet a color.
What remains after seeing the same light for years is color.

Line.

The wind and terrain of a land set the speed of the brush.

There are lands from which fast lines come.
There are lands from which slow lines come.

A line is the trace of a hand and also the trace of time.
How long one hesitated stays in the line.

Void.

What is left empty tells more about a land than what is painted.

An empty place is not an absent place.
It is the place of what has not yet come.
Or the place of what has already left.

Paintings with wide voids mostly come from lands where the waiting is long.

Grammar.

The order and the relation in which things are set down.

Where the horizon is put.
Where in the picture a person is stood.
What is made large and what is made small.

This is not a rule but a habit.
And habit comes from the land.

Materiality.

What one paints with.

Soil and ash and lead.
Straw and stone and ice.

What the things within reach have left on the surface.
The material is often what was found in that land.

Look at what a painting was made with and you see where it was made.
Sometimes the material outlasts the painting.

Passing these five gates, sixteen painters are called.

Chusa, Bada Shanren, Sesshū, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Picasso, Kiefer, Turner, Levitan, O'Keeffe, Tamayo, Emily Carr, Fred Williams, Goldsworthy, Kapoor, Munch.

Who stands before which gate is stated at the head of each part.

And in the final chapter it reaches Byun Shi-Ji.

8. Three Witnesses for the Other Side

A proposition lives only if it survives what contradicts it.

If fūdo begets form, the cases where it does not must also be seen.
This book calls three men as witnesses for the other side.

Chusa.

He spent years of exile on Jeju.
In those years his calligraphy was completed.

Yet there is no Jeju landscape in that calligraphy.
Neither the sea nor the wind enters.

His body was on the island and his eyes were on the old characters.

Fūdo tempered him but did not beget his form.
It is the place where spirit passed fūdo by.

Munch.

His sky is red.

But that red did not come from the sky of Norway.
It went from inside to outside.

Fūdo did not beget the form. The inner life stained fūdo.
The direction is reversed.

Gauguin.

He went to Tahiti.
He painted the color and the bodies of that land.

But in the end he did not belong to it.
He remained in the place of the one who looks.

In his pictures Tahiti is not a place endured but a place gone to.
A painter present without belonging.

The three men shake the proposition of this book.
They should shake it.

Fūdo does not beget everything.

There are times when spirit passes beyond fūdo.
There are times when the inner life covers fūdo.
There are times when one paints with the feet not touching the ground.

Only this: some paintings cannot be explained without fūdo.

To see that difference is the work of this book.

9. Placed Side by Side

This book does not rank.

It is not a book that measures Byun Shi-Ji against the painters of the world to raise him.
It is a book that sets him at the same height and looks at them side by side.

Turner is not before and Byun Shi-Ji after.
Kiefer is not large and Byun Shi-Ji small.

Each begot his own form in his own land.
Gathering those events in one place is a way of reading differently.

There are two kinds of comparison.

One puts things on a scale.
It asks which side is heavier.

The other places them side by side.
It watches what passes between them.

This book takes the second.

Placed side by side, both are seen well.
Put on a scale, both grow dim.

While the weight is disputed, the paintings withdraw.

It is the same within Korea.

Dansaekhwa is a true achievement.
That place is whole as it is.
There is a place reached through repetition and restraint.

Byun Shi-Ji is not a competitor to that achievement.
He is another root.

Roots do not quarrel.
Each goes down its own way.
They cannot be seen under the ground, but they hold up the same tree.

10. Fūdo Is Not Fate

Care is needed in speaking of fūdo.

To say that land determines people turns easily into another saying.
That one people is like this and another people is like that.

There are such passages in Watsuji's book as well.
It was writing of the 1930s, and it carried the limits of its time.

This book does not go that way.

Fūdo is not the character of a group.
It is what remains in one person's body.

Not every painter who lived on Jeju painted the same painting.
Different lines come out of the same wind.

Fūdo does not give an answer.
It gives a question.

If it were fate, art would not be needed.
No one stakes a life on confirming what is already settled.

Byun Shi-Ji went to Jeju.
Going alone did not change the painting.
The color came later.

That he found it means it was not settled.

Fūdo is condition, and form is choice.
Without condition there is no choice, and without choice there is no form.

This book looks at both places together.

11. 1975, Seoul to Jeju

Byun Shi-Ji was born in 1926 in Seohong-dong, Seogwipo.
At five he went to Osaka.

He grew up in Japan and learned painting in Japan.
From 1942 to 1945 he attended the Osaka School of Art.
He studied under Terauchi Manjirō.

It was wartime.
How he passed his youth remains in the oral history.
(Korean Culture and Arts Foundation oral history, 2004–2005, pp. 27–30)

In 1947 Femme was accepted into the Nitten.
He was the first Korean.

The next year he received the top prize at the 34th Kōfūkai exhibition.
He was twenty-two.

In 1949 he held a solo exhibition at the Shiseido Gallery.

In Japan he was already a painter.
Had he stayed, another life was there.

On November 15, 1957, he returned.

He lived in Seoul.
He taught at Mapo High School and Sorabol Art College.
From 1964 he painted Biwon for a long time.

The Biwon paintings are composed.
The trees and walls and water of the old palace are set down in quiet color.

It is a scene inside a wall.
There is no place for the wind to enter.

He continued the series for more than ten years.

He taught and he painted.
Life in Seoul was settled.

But it was inside a wall.

And in 1975 he left Seoul and went to Jeju.
He took a post at Jeju National University.

One thing should be made clear here.

He did not go from Japan straight to Jeju.
From Osaka to Seoul, and from Seoul again to Jeju.

There were two moves.
And the second move changed his form.

He was forty-nine.
He had come back after forty-four years to the island he left at five.

The island did not welcome him.
There was wind, the sun was hard, the winter was long.

The colors he had used in Seoul did not fit the island.
The moisture differed, the light differed, the wind differed.

And then the color changed.

Later, in the oral history, he spoke of how he found that color.
(same record, pp. 293–294)

We call that color the color of dried grass.

It is not ochre.
It is not yellow.
It is the color of grass long dried by wind.

Not the green of summer, but the color of grass that has passed a winter.
Not a dead color, but a color that has endured.

In the same record he also spoke of the storm.
He said the storm was not weather but resistance.
(same record, p. 171)

So the wind in the paintings is not meteorology.
It is a name for endurance.

He called himself pungunna (風雲兒), a man of wind and cloud.
His pen name was Useong (宇城).

In 1991 he reached retirement at Jeju National University.
He died on June 8, 2013.
In 2016 a national cultural medal was conferred posthumously.

The paintings he left are catalogued from W001 to W110.

12. What Remains

Back to that hill.

The old man is still standing.
The horse is beside him.
Near the horizon a small boat floats.

There is no telling whether the boat is leaving or returning.
The painting does not say.

Jeju has the story of an island called Ieodo.
An island said to lie somewhere in the sea.
Those who go do not come back.

The painter left writing about Ieodo in his own hand.
(same record, pp. 23–26)

The island once lost many people.
That event is called 4·3.
He spoke of those years in the oral history.
(same record, pp. 241–243)

The departing boat touches the legend, and at the same time it touches that mourning.

The old man's head is bowed.
Not from sorrow.
It is the respect owed to those who did not return.

This too is interpretation.
Only that standing long before the painting, it reads that way.

This book will look for that posture again on hills around the world.

Under the damp light of England.
On the long horizon of Russia.
Under the dry sky of New Mexico.

The lands differ and the colors differ.
But that a body long enduring begets form is the same.

This book does not set down an answer.
It only passes sixteen hills.

On each hill one person stands.
We see what he endured, and see what form came out of it.

And on the last hill we meet this old man again.

He did not explain Jeju.
He looked at it a long time.
He drew one line where the wind had passed.

To see how that line came out.

This book begins there.