Marc Chagall — I and the Village

A green face and an animal face look at one another. Between them, houses, a church, a farmer, and a tree float and turn upside down.

Gravity weakens inside memory. Yesterday and thirty years ago stand side by side, and a distant birthplace becomes closer than the present. Chagall did not paint home as it objectively was. He painted the way memory works.

The picture was made in Paris, but Vitebsk fills its interior. His body had left; his eyes had returned. The canvas became a homeland for someone who could not fully go back.

Byun Shi-Ji returned in life. After Japan and Seoul, he went back to Jeju around the age of fifty. Yet the paintings of the person who returned are, strangely, more desolate. Chagall’s homeland brightened in memory; Byun’s remained a reality to be endured each day.

A homeland one cannot reach becomes a dream. A homeland one reaches becomes climate and condition. One returns through memory; the other through the body.

Chagall holds a small tree. Byun’s old man holds a staff—one to plant, the other to endure.