A Map of Fūdo Modernism

Outside Painting

Opening

This book has passed sixteen people.

Each begot his own form in his own land.

But one thing was not asked.

Did they know it.

Turner cannot have painted thinking he was painting the damp of England.
Levitan cannot have drawn while naming it the horizon of Russia.

Fūdo mostly enters without one knowing.

And there are those who went into it knowing.

People who made land their own task.

Setting down where they were is what this appendix is.

And one more thing is set down.

This work has a shadow.

Say the shadow first, or one falls at that place later.

One — Three Layers

The relation of fūdo and form is not one thing.

It divides into three layers.

First, the case of what has soaked in.

The person does not know it.

He was born and raised in that land and saw only that light.
Knowing no other light, there is nothing to compare.

Turner and Levitan and Sesshū are here.

Most of this book is this layer.

Second, the case made a task.

One person chooses a land.

And digs into it a long time.

He does not declare.
He only continues.

This layer has awareness and no programme.

Third, the case that became a programme.

Several gather and declare.

They say they will establish the art of this land.
They write, and they make a movement.

It is the strongest and the most dangerous.

This appendix looks at the second and the third.

Two — Architecture Already Had a Name

Here one thing must be granted.

What painting means to do, architecture did first.

It got a name first as well.

In 1981 two people first used a term.
Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre.

It was in an essay called “The Grid and the Pathway.”

Two years later Kenneth Frampton used the same words in a slightly different sense.
That was the essay of 1983.

It is called Critical Regionalism.

Frampton's essay opens with a question.

He took it from Paul Ricoeur.

How to become modern and to return to sources.

That question is the question of this book.

Then the argument runs like this.

The same buildings are going up everywhere in the world.
Boxes made of glass and steel.

That is the International Style.

That sameness has to be resisted.

But one must not go toward imitating old roofs.
That is nostalgia, not resistance.

Then what does one resist with.

One resists with light, with terrain, with wind, with what the hand touches.

At this point Frampton cited Heidegger.

“Building, Dwelling, Thinking.”
An essay of 1954.

He took one sentence from it.

A boundary is not that at which something stops, but that from which something begins its presencing.

The same place this book passed through in its Prologue.

And the same thing we said of the void in Part Three.

So it can be put this way.

What painting means to ask, architecture asked forty years ago.

This fact is not unfavorable to this book.

It is rather a footing.

Establish a new concept and there is much to prove.
Stand beside a lineage that already exists and the position is fixed at once.

The names belonging here are set down.

Alvar Aalto, Finland.
Jørn Utzon, Denmark.
Luis Barragán, Mexico.
Geoffrey Bawa, Sri Lanka.
Rifat Chadirji, Iraq.
Sverre Fehn, Norway.
Balkrishna Doshi and Charles Correa, India.
Peter Zumthor, Switzerland.

One more is looked at.

Glenn Murcutt built houses in Australia.

He said one touches that land lightly.

He did not cut the ground away; he set the house on it.
He let the wind pass through.

The same thought as the stone walls of Jeju.

Do not block. Let through.

The same answer came out in two places.

Three — Those Who Made It a Task

The second layer.

This place is closest to this book.

Amrita Sher-Gil

Born in 1913.

Her father was Indian and her mother Hungarian.

She learned painting in Paris.
She was at the École des Beaux-Arts from 1930 to 1934.

And at the end of 1934 she went back to India.

After going back the painting changed.

The colors she had used in Paris did not fit in India.

She travelled the villages.

In 1937 she saw the wall paintings at Ajanta.

The color lowered and the forms grew simple.

She died at twenty-eight.

A short life.

There is something to note here.

She went out to learn, came back, and the color changed.

That curve is not unfamiliar.

Sesshū was so and Byun Shi-Ji was so.

Only Sher-Gil went earlier and left earlier.

Jóhannes Kjarval

An Icelander.

He painted lava.

There are few trees in that land.
Instead there is hardened lava and moss.

Nothing anyone had painted.

He painted it all his life.

Of everything the land gave, he chose the least presentable and made it the subject of a life.

Fred Williams

An Australian.

He discovered that the continent is flat.

European landscape has a horizon and a front and a back.
That continent does not.

So he pushed the horizon up or removed it altogether.

He scattered single trees like dots.

The picture looks like a map.

Because that land actually looks that way.

Four — The Cases That Became Programmes

The third layer.

From here the force grows and the shadow darkens.

Canada, a Group of Seven

Around 1920.

Seven people gathered.

They held that Canadian art was imitating Europe.

They went north.

They painted lakes and rock and conifers.

They used strong color and thick line.

And they said this was the art of Canada.

They succeeded.

Those paintings are still national in Canada.

It was one of them who recognized Emily Carr.

South America, an Inverted Map

Joaquín Torres-García was Uruguayan.

He spent a long time in Europe and came back.

In 1934 he drew a map.

A map with South America upside down.

The south went to the top.

He said:

Our north is the south.

It was one small drawing.

And it became a programme.

Japan, the Nameless Hand

There was Yanagi Sōetsu.

He collected things made by nameless craftsmen.

Rice bowls and clothing and small tables.

He called it mingei.

He said those things were beautiful because they did not try to leave a name.

They were made by local clay and local hands.

There is force in this thought.

And the shadow to be seen below comes out of here as well.

Australia, the Painting of the Desert

It began at a school in 1971.

A place called Papunya.

There was a teacher named Geoffrey Bardon.

He asked the children to paint a mural.

The older men of the community saw it and took up the brush.

That is how Indigenous painters began painting with paint.

Before that they painted on sand and on the body.

The surface filled with dots.

It looks as though seen from above, and it looks like a map.

Westerners called it abstraction.

They were wrong.

It is not abstraction.

It is the structure of the land.

Watercourses and camps and the paths stories travelled became the surface directly.

This point matters.

It is a case of looking alike with a different source.

The surface looks similar to American abstract expressionism.

But one came from the painter's gesture and the other from the land.

The same structure as what this book said about Dansaekhwa and Byun Shi-Ji.

A similar surface does not mean the same root.

Egypt, Houses Built of Earth

There was Hassan Fathy.

He built with mud brick instead of concrete.

Material that was in that land.

It is cheap and it keeps out heat.

He tried to build houses for poor people.

Parts succeeded and parts failed.

Only the question was clear.

Can one build the houses of this land with the material of this land.

Five — The Shadow

Now the difficult place.

Make fūdo a programme and there is a place one must pass.

Speak of land and one comes to speak of belonging.

Speak of belonging and one comes to speak of who belongs and who does not.

Then exclusion follows.

Three things are set down.

One.

There are no people in the north the seven painted.

It is empty land.

And people were living on that land.

That it was painted as empty became a problem.

It is still under discussion.

Two.

The eye of mingei was beautiful.

But where that eye stood when it looked at the things of a colony is another matter.

There was a difference of power between the one looking and the one looked at.

This too is under discussion.

Three.

There is the worst case.

There was a phrase, Blood and Soil.

A phrase that bound land and lineage into one.

We know where that phrase went.

So it has to be said this way.

Fūdo can be used to bind people.

At that point fūdo stops being a condition and becomes a possession.

A condition is open to anyone.
A possession appoints an owner.

This book uses fūdo as a condition.

Not as a possession.

Miss this distinction and this book becomes dangerous.

Six — The Place of One Who Did Not Declare

Here Byun Shi-Ji is looked at again.

Which layer is he in.

Not the first.

He left the island at five.
The color was not in the body.

At forty-nine he decided to go back.

That was a choice.

Not the third either.

He made no group.
He wrote no programme.

He never said let us establish our art.

So it is the second.

Someone who decided alone and continued a long time.

Thirty-eight years.

And here one thing shows itself.

Not declaring protected him.

Declare and one represents.

Represent and there appear those who are not represented.

He never said he represented anyone.

So he never erased anyone.

What is on his surface is one old man.

Not the people of Jeju entire.

One person.

The aesthetic that does not fight was not passivity.

It is what kept him out of the shadow.

Closing

Draw the map and something becomes clear.

This question was not one person's question.

In Finland, in India, in Uruguay, in Iceland, in Egypt.

The same question arose separately in each.

Can what belongs to this land be made into what belongs to this age.

The answers differed.

In some places it became a building, in some a bowl, in some a painting.

In some places it became a programme and in some it passed quietly.

Byun Shi-Ji is the quiet side.

He established nothing.

He only went to the island and stayed a long time.

And he found one color.

If a point were marked on the map,
that point would make no sound.