Jejuhwa, When Wind Becomes Language

1. The Hill Again

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.
Near the horizon a small boat floats.

A crow passes low.

In the Prologue we stood on this hill.

And we have passed sixteen hills.

The dry sun of Mexico and the clear air of New Mexico.
The red sky of Norway.
The inside of a thorn fence on Jeju and the wet paper of Japan.
The rising forest of the Canadian west coast.
The empty paper of the late Ming and the wide soil of Australia.
The damp of England and the manufactured hole of London.
The layered grammar of the Mediterranean and the low horizon of Russia.
The pink ground of Tahiti.
The ash of Germany and the stone of Scotland and the thick paint of Provence.

Now we are here again.

The painting is as it was.

The old man is as he was and the horse is as it was.
The small boat is in its place.

And it looks different.

What has changed.

It is not the painting that changed.
We passed through sixteen places.

Comparison does not change the object.
It changes the one looking.

That is what this book has done.

2. What We Passed

Of the sixteen, four were witnesses for the other side.

Their testimony has to be heard again.

Munch said color comes from within.

The winter of Norway is dark and his sky was red.
It was not a color the land gave.

Chusa said form comes out even when fūdo is cut off.

He spent eight years on this island and did not paint this island.
His eyes were on old characters.

Kapoor said a void can be manufactured.

Calculate and cut and coat, and an emptiness belonging to no land appears.

Gauguin said the most painful thing.

He said one can live in that land and the grammar of that land may still not come.
He lived ten years and painted with the grammar he carried in.

Hear all four testimonies and the proposition grows smaller.

That fūdo begets form does not hold for every painting.

Still something remains.

Some paintings are not explained without fūdo.

Try to explain them and gaps open.
One cannot say why this color, why this line, why it is empty this much.

Byun Shi-Ji is such a case.

This cannot be proved.

Proof narrows to one thing, and a painting does not narrow to one thing.

But it can be shown.

Passing the five gates again, it will be shown.

3. Color — What Was Wet and Then Dried

In Part One we asked where color comes from.

Tamayo's red had soil in it.
The dry ground of Oaxaca gave that color.

O'Keeffe's color came from dry air.
With no moisture the color did not blur.

The color of dried grass differs from both.

O'Keeffe's dryness was dry from the beginning.

The bone in the desert was never wet.
After the flesh was gone it stayed dry.

The color of dried grass was wet and then dried.

Jeju is humid.
It is surrounded by sea, so it is.

And the wind is strong.

Where the wind is strong, things dry.

It is a land that dries while wet.

This contradiction is the condition of that color.

The grass grew in rain.
In summer it was green.

And it dried in wind.

So there are two times inside that color.

The time of growing and the time of drying.

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.

He found this color.

Later, in the oral history, he spoke of how he found it.
(Korean Culture and Arts Foundation oral history, 2004–2005, pp. 293–294)

The word found has to be looked at a long time.

It was not something held.

He left the island at five, so it was not in the body.
He grew up in Osaka and painted in Seoul.

He painted Biwon for more than ten years.
The color of that time is composed and quiet.

He came back at forty-nine and found it.

So this color is not an inheritance.
It is a discovery.

Tamayo was born with that color.
Byun Shi-Ji found his.

Into a color that was found goes the time of the one who found it.

That it has no name should be seen as well.

It is not ochre.
It is not yellow.

It could not be called by an existing name, so a new one had to be made.

A color without a name is made only in that land.

A color with a name can be bought anywhere.

4. Line — What Lies Sideways

In Part Two we asked what sets the speed of the brush.

Chusa's line came from stone.
It was the speed of a blade digging stone.

Sesshū's line came from wet paper.
He had to pass before it bled.

Emily Carr's line went up.
Because the trees of a forest grow upward.

Byun Shi-Ji's line lies sideways.

Where the wind is strong, trees lie down.

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

People are the same.

The shoulders tilt and the head lowers.

On his surface the figure is often bent.

Since when has this bending been there.

It is already in the nude study of 1945.
It is in the last painting of 2013.

Sixty-eight years.

One curve continued for sixty-eight years.

Only the meaning changed.

At first it was the body of labor.

The Tokyo studies and Femme are such.
The body bearing a load, the working body, was bent.

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.

The working people of three periods.

Then the old man appears.

The old man's body carries no load.

And still it is bent.

It is the body of endurance.

The working body turned into the enduring body.

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.

But one thing is fact.

The form went in one direction for sixty-eight years.

Go in one direction long enough and it becomes not a habit but a sentence.

5. Void — Empty in Two Layers

In Part Three we saw four kinds of void.

Bada Shanren's void had no water.
An empty place because something is absent.

Williams's void was filled with the same thing.
An empty place by repetition.

Turner's void was erased.
A place where moisture dissolved form.

Kapoor's emptiness was manufactured.
A designed place.

Where does Byun Shi-Ji's void belong.

It is empty because it is not seen.

There is wind.
It is not painted, and it is there.

Bada Shanren's void is the void of absence and this is the void of the unseen.

The place where an institution vanished and the place where nature is not seen are different.

But here there is one more thing.

It is the place of those who did not return.

The island once lost many people.
That event is called 4·3.

The painter spoke of those years in the oral history.
(same record, pp. 241–243)

And Jeju has the story of Ieodo.

An island said to lie somewhere in the sea.
Those who go do not come back.

He left writing about that island in his own hand.
(same record, pp. 23–26)

So his void is in two layers.

Empty because nature is not seen.
And empty because people are gone.

These two layers lie over each other.

That is why the empty place is not bright.

Turner's void was bright.
Because the light was in that place.

This void is low.

A void with absent people in it cannot be bright.

The old man's bowed head is the respect owed toward that void.

This too is interpretation.

Only that standing long before the painting, it reads that way.

6. Grammar — One and One

In Part Four we asked what is placed where.

Picasso broke the grammar.
Because he grew up in a land where several grammars were layered.

Levitan settled the meaning with the height of a single horizon.
On flat ground that was the only thing to settle.

Gauguin placed things exactly and belonged nowhere.

Byun Shi-Ji reduced.

His grammar has only three elements.

One horizon.
One person.
And the void that is left.

Sometimes a horse is added, a crow is added, a small boat is added.

Beyond that there is almost nothing.

Why did he reduce.

Because there was nothing to break.

On layered ground one can break.
There are several, so one is not bound to any.

On the island he returned to there was one.

One wind, one sea, one horizon.

What there is only one of cannot be broken.
Break it and nothing is left.

So the way left is to place it more exactly.

Reduce, and the position of each element becomes decisive.

With only three, move one a little and the whole surface changes.

The height of the horizon settles the meaning.

Raise it and the sea widens; lower it and the sky widens.

Where the person is stood also settles the meaning.

His old man is usually in the lower part of the surface.

And a little off from the middle.

Put him at the exact center and he becomes a monument.
Set him off center and he becomes a person.

And he shows his back.

This is the last decision.

Gauguin's figures look at us.

They sit facing front with their eyes open wide.
It is a position set to be looked at.

Then we become viewers.

Byun Shi-Ji's old man shows his back.

He does not look at us.
He looks in the same direction we do.

Then we stop being viewers.

We come to stand beside that person.

We are set in the place that takes the same wind.

This is the purpose of this grammar.

Not to make one look but to make one stand.

7. Materiality — Keeping It Thin

In Part Five we asked what one paints with.

Kiefer carried the ground onto the surface.
He laid on soil and ash and lead and straw.

Goldsworthy set the surface on the ground.
He got it in that place and made it in that place.

Van Gogh made the paint itself into matter.
He took light with thickness.

Byun Shi-Ji kept it thin.

The three added and he did not add.

This can look like a lack.

It is not.

What is dry is thin.

Put paint on thickly and it looks moist.
Thickness has the feeling of moisture in it.

Paint the color of dried grass thickly and it stops being the color of dried grass.

So thinness is a choice made to protect the color.

He kept the material from betraying the color.

There is one more condition here.

His material is not of that land.

He used oil paint and canvas.
Material that came from the West.

The hand trained in Osaka moved the same way on Jeju.

Kiefer used the soil underfoot.
Goldsworthy used the stone of that place.

Byun Shi-Ji had nothing of the kind.

More exactly, he had not been trained that way.

He left at five and came back forty-four years later.
The hand had already been made elsewhere.

He could not change the material.

So he changed the color.

He changed what could be changed.

This too is endurance.

Work done with what one has is rarely given a name.

But that is mostly what people do.

8. The Name Jejuhwa

Now a name can be given.

Call it Jejuhwa.

It does not mean painting that depicts Jeju.

That would make it local color.

In the Prologue we divided the two.

Local color is a matter of subject.
It means the things of that land were painted.

Jejuhwa is not the name of a subject.
It is the name of a form.

What makes it hold.

Five things have to be there together.

Color that was wet and then dried.
Line that lies sideways.
A void empty in two layers.
The grammar of one and one.
A thin surface that protects the dryness.

These five apart are characteristics.
Together they are a form.

And all five came out of the same condition.

The wind.

The wind dries the grass, lays the trees down, carries the moisture away, tilts a person's shoulders.

When one condition appears in five places it becomes a style.

Here we have to be honest.

Can what one person made be called a style.

It can.

Only the lineage is still short.

A style becomes a style by being continued.

If it ends with one person it is an individual's manner.
If those who come after take it up it becomes a style.

That work is not this book's part.

This book goes only as far as setting the name down.

With a name it can be found.
If it can be found it can be taken up.

9. Exile and Blessing

The root sentence of this book is this.

Life is exile. Art is blessing.

Passing through this book, exile came up several times.

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

Bada Shanren lost a dynasty.
He had nowhere to belong.

Levitan was expelled from a city.
It happened even though he was a known painter.

Gauguin left of his own accord.
He left and returned and left again.

Kapoor stands across two lands.
He belongs wholly to neither.

Byun Shi-Ji's exile differs from these.

It is exile in the place one has returned to.

He came back to the island he was born on and was a stranger.

Away forty-four years, it could not have been otherwise.

The speech was different, what he had learned was different, few people knew him.

And there was nowhere further to go.

The place he returned to was the last place.

So his exile has no amnesty.

Institutional exile ends.
One who was expelled can return.
One who left can leave again.

Exile in the place one has returned to does not end.

What does not end can only be endured.

And the words he left do not end with exile.

Art is blessing.

Blessing is not rapture.

It is not a state of overflowing joy.

It is the light that comes after endurance.

What color is that light.

The color of dried grass.

Dry grass is not dead.
It has passed a winter.

What has passed through and remains has a color.

That color is the blessing.

Here the proposition of this book and that sentence meet.

Fūdo begets form.

And that form turns endurance into blessing.

The wind torments a person.
That is exile.

Color comes out of the place the wind has left.
That is blessing.

The same wind does both.

10. When Wind Becomes Language

Wind is not speech.

It makes a sound and has no meaning.

The same sound only repeats.

And take it long enough and meaning appears.

Because the body of a person records that meaning.

A tree lies to one side.
Holes appear in a stone wall.
The roof of a thatched house is held down with straw rope.
A person's shoulders tilt.

These are writing the wind has made.

What is written can be read.

If it can be read it is language.

What Byun Shi-Ji did was not to paint the wind.

Wind cannot be painted.

What he did was read what the wind left and write it again.

So his surface is a translation.

A translation carrying the speech of wind over into the eyes of a person.

A translation has an original.

The original of his painting is that island.

A translation can be read without knowing the original.
But knowing the original, it reads differently.

That is what this book has tried to do.

To go one step toward the original.

The hill again.

An old man stands.
A horse is beside him.
A small boat floats near the horizon.

A crow passes low.

The wind is not seen.

And now it can be read.

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

That line we can now read.

And having read it, it grows quiet again.

An old man stands on a hill.

The wind passes.