The Japan Years, 1940–1957

1. Fifteen Years Old

In 1940, Byun Shi-Ji entered the Western Painting Department of the Osaka School of Fine Arts. He was fifteen.
He graduated in 1945 — the year the war ended, and the year his homeland, liberated, began to divide.

The school's curriculum followed the system of modern Japanese art education established at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts: anatomy, drawing from the nude, painting en plein air. The training of the Western academy, transplanted whole. Within it, Byun built his foundation in drawing and oil painting.

A foundation is something one later abandons.
But one must first possess what one abandons.

After graduating he moved to Tokyo and enrolled at the Athénée Français to study French — an attempt, it seems, to read Western art in its own language.

---

2. The Teacher: Terauchi Manjirō

In Tokyo, Byun entered the studio of Terauchi Manjirō (寺內萬治郞, 1890–1964).

Terauchi, a graduate of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, stood at the center of Japanese academic Western-style painting. His work was marked by calm tonality and rigorous draughtsmanship; he devoted much of his career to the human figure. In the postwar years he served as a senior figure of the Nitten (日展) establishment and trained many students.

From this studio Byun took two things.

A hand — the drawing that sets a figure firmly on the canvas, the handling of oil paint in layers.
An eye — a sense for what can be removed before a picture falls silent.

Both would reappear, utterly transformed, thirty years later on Jeju.

---

3. Into the Art World

The Grand Prize of 1948 came at the age of twenty-three. Among the submitted works were Woman in a Beret and Woman with a Mandolin.

The paintings of this period center on the figure: soft light, restrained shadow, precise flesh. The grammar of the moderate Western-style painting (yōga) that the Japanese academy had long refined is fully present on the canvas.

He mastered that grammar completely.
It was because he had mastered it that he could later leave it.

A note on sources — Several accounts in circulation quote contemporary Japanese critics on Byun's work of this period. No such quotation has yet been traced to a named critic, publication, and date. This archive does not print unverified quotations. A survey of period art journals and exhibition catalogues is in progress.

---

4. Where He Stood

The Japanese Western-painting world of the 1940s–50s ran in two currents.

One was the academic line of the Kōfūkai and the Nitten. The other was the postwar avant-garde then coming into being; by the late 1950s, movements such as Gutai (具體) were drawing international attention.

Western eyes in those years inclined toward Japanese prints and the avant-garde. The signal moment came in 1951, when the printmaker Saitō Kiyoshi took a top prize in the print division of the first São Paulo Bienal.

Byun belonged fully to neither current.
He completed the academic training to its end, and won its prizes.
But the place he finally reached was neither the academy nor the avant-garde.

It was Jeju.

That place did not yet have a name.
Naming it would take another thirty years.

---

5. How to Read These Years

To read the Japan years merely as apprenticeship is to miss their meaning.

In these years Byun learned the language of Western painting as if it were a mother tongue. This is why, when he later dismantled that language on Jeju, the dismantling was not incapacity but choice.

Only those who possess something can give it away.

---

Sources

• - Kōfūkai exhibition records and catalogues (survey in progress)
• - On Terauchi Manjirō: archives of the Tokyo National Research Institute for Cultural Properties
• - On Saitō Kiyoshi: Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art

Statements of fact and interpretation are kept distinct in this text. Interpretations are the author's.

← 국문본 보기← Back to Research