Chusa, Spirit without Fūdo

One

A long horizontal sheet.

On the right there is one house.

The roof is low.
A round window is cut into the wall.

There is no person.

To the left of the house there are trees.
Pine and juniper.

About four of them.

Old trees.
The branches on one side are dead and only one side lives.

And the rest is empty.

More than half the paper has nothing on it.

There is no ground.
There is no telling where the house sits.

There is no sky either.
The upper boundary is simply paper.

The ink was used very sparingly.
There is almost no dense ink.

The house was raised with a few thin lines.

There are places the brush passed while dry.
Dry brush.

The grain of the paper is visible.

This picture was made on Jeju.

In 1844, at Daejeong.
While he was in exile.

And there is no Jeju on this surface.

No sea.
No wind.

No stone wall and no thatched roof.
No horse and no crow.

This chapter begins here.

Two

Kim Jeong-hui was born in 1786.

He had several names.
Chusa and Wandang are the ones widely used.

Around twenty-four he went to Yanjing.
He went with his father's embassy.

There he met the scholars of the Qing.

Weng Fanggang and Ruan Yuan.
Great scholars of the day.

A young Joseon scholar met them and was recognized.

That meeting decided his life.

What he saw there was not painting.
It was writing, and more exactly, old characters.

It is called epigraphy.

The study of gathering and comparing characters cut into steles and bronzes.

Characters cut in stone are not like characters written with a brush.

They must be dug with a blade, so the strokes are thick and angular.
Time wears them and the ends crumble.

That crumbled place becomes force.

Chusa tried to carry that force over into the brush.

He returned to Joseon and studied for a long time.

He went to the stele on Bukhansan, read the characters, and established the record.
He showed who had raised it and when.

It was not scholarship at a desk.
It was scholarship that climbed a mountain and touched stone.

He wrote a great deal.

The story goes that he wore through ten inkstones and used up a thousand brushes.
People say it was his own remark.

There is no verifying it.
Only that the surviving writing proves he wrote that much.

In 1840 he was exiled to Jeju.

The sentence set him at Daejeong within a fence of thorns.

He was there more than eight years.
He was released in 1848.

Even after release he was not at ease.
Some years later he was exiled again, to Bukcheong.

He died in 1856.

Three

Here is the argument of this chapter.

Chusa completed his calligraphy on Jeju.

And there is no Jeju in that calligraphy.

This sentence must be divided in two.

The first half is close to fact.

Eight years of isolation kept him seated before the brush.
There was nothing to do and few people to meet.

There was nothing but writing.

So it is true that exile tempered him.

The second half is also fact.

There is not one thing of Jeju in Sehando.
Nor in his calligraphy.

The thick and thin of the stroke change abruptly.
The turns are angular.

That is the speed of stone.
The speed of a blade digging stone.

It is not the speed of wind.

So it can be put this way.

Exile was the condition. But Jeju was not the condition.

What he needed was not some particular land but no land at all.

He needed isolation, and isolation is possible anywhere.

He wrote at Bukcheong too.
He wrote at Gwacheon.

The land changed and the writing went in the same direction.

Three things follow.

First, a line crosses media.

Carrying the speed of stone into paper is translation.

Blade and brush are different tools.
Stone and paper are different grounds.

And he remade the force of the first in the material of the second.

Here the line does not come from that land.
It comes from another material in another age.

It is a line that crossed time.

Second, the void is not a place.

The void of Sehando is wide.
More than half the surface.

And that void is not the void of Jeju.

It is not sea and it is not field.
It is paper.

The void of literati painting is a place where there is no thing, not a place where something is.

This distinction will be taken up again in Part Three.
For now only this is set down.

An empty area of the same width is a place on one surface and paper on another.

Third, the absence of fūdo can be a condition.

This is the most important.

This book says that fūdo begets form.

Chusa is the opposite case.
Form came out of a place where fūdo was cut off.

Inside the fence of thorns he did not look at the island.
He looked at books and paper and old characters.

When the outside is blocked, the inside deepens.

This too is a road.

And this road does not break the proposition of this book.
It shows the proposition's range.

Fūdo begets form.
Only, not every form comes out of fūdo.

Four

Stand before Byun Shi-Ji's surface.

This encounter is special.

Because it is the same island.

In the last part we set distant lands beside one another.
Mexico and Jeju, New Mexico and Jeju.

Here it is the same land.

Chusa spent eight years on Jeju.
Byun Shi-Ji spent thirty-eight years on Jeju.

They met the same wind and saw the same sea.

And the result is the exact opposite.

On one surface there is no island, and on the other there is nothing but island.

Where does this difference come from.

First, the reason for going differs.

Chusa was sent.
Byun Shi-Ji went.

To one who is sent, the land is punishment.
Punishment is endured, not looked at.

One who endures closes his eyes.
He wishes it past quickly.

To one who goes, the land is a purpose.
A purpose is looked at a long time.

Second, whether there was somewhere to return to differs.

Chusa had somewhere to return to.
There was Seoul and there was a place in scholarship.

He was passing through Jeju.

For Byun Shi-Ji, Jeju was where he had returned.
He left at five and came back at forty-nine.

There was nowhere further to go.

One passing through and one who has arrived see the same land differently.

Here the word exile must be looked at again.

The root sentence of this book is this.

Life is exile. Art is blessing.

Chusa's exile was handed down by an institution.
There is a document, there is a term, there is amnesty.

Byun Shi-Ji's exile is not that.

It is the recognition that life is so to begin with.
There is no amnesty.

Institutional exile ends.
The exile of a life does not.

To endure what does not end, you have to look at the place.

So one man did not look at the island and the other did.

The line differs too.

Chusa's line stops.

When a stroke ends it is complete.
The next stroke does not touch it.

Between stroke and stroke there is an empty area, and that area is exact.

Byun Shi-Ji's line trembles.

It goes straight and then wavers.
The end can go faint.

That is how a line that digs stone and a line drawn in wind differ.

The void differs too.

Both surfaces have a wide void.
In that they are alike.

But in the empty area of Sehando there is nothing.
Not that what should be there is absent, but that nothing needs to be there.

In Byun Shi-Ji's empty area there is wind.
It was not painted, and it is there.

One void is empty and the other is full.

Now it must be said without hierarchy.

That Chusa did not look at the island was not a fault.

He looked at something else and reached the highest point in that something else.
His calligraphy is still hard to surpass.

It is testimony that spirit can pass beyond land.

And this testimony is what keeps this book humble.

Say that fūdo begets everything and a person becomes the product of a land.
Then art is not needed.

Chusa says it is not so.

On the same island one man painted the island and one did not.

Both were right.

Five

Inside a fence of thorns a man sits.

Outside there is sea and there is wind.
He does not paint them.

He spreads the paper and grinds the ink.
The brush passes while dry.

One house and a few trees come into being.

The rest is left empty.

Into that emptied area the island does not enter.

Eight years passed and he left the island.
After he left, only that picture remained.

A hundred and some years later a man came back to the same island.

He painted the sea.
He painted the wind.

On the same land two men saw different things.

The land said nothing.