Limits of the Study and the State of the Sources

1The Corpus of Works

This book cross-uses the byunshiji.org 100 Works, published catalogues, artist’s notes, oral history and material held by the family. The 100 Works is a public archive of selected major works, not a catalogue raisonné. Statements about the frequency of colour, line, empty space, boats, horizons and bent bodies therefore mean tendencies recurring in the currently verifiable group of works, not statistics fixing the quantity of the whole output. At the head of each of the nine arguments, this book lists exceptional works that do not fit the proposition together with representative cases.

2Dates and Exhibition Records

The year of entry to the Osaka Art School is given variously as 1941 and 1942. It will be finally settled with the school register or contemporary official records as the primary source. For 1947, the first selection at the 33rd Kōfūkai Exhibition is currently confirmed in the biography of the oral history transcript; selection for the 1947 Nitten is not used in this book as a confirmed fact. The first solo exhibition at the Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo, in 1949 agrees with the biography. Qualifiers such as “first” or “youngest” are used only where official records of the institution concerned have been secured.

3Work Information and Checking Against Originals

Date, material, dimensions and collection of works are checked in the order of catalogue, collection records and inscriptions on the back of the work. Colour temperature, pigment and surface texture are not settled from online reproductions alone. In particular, the core arguments on “the color of dried grass,” the materiality of the black line, coloured empty space and luminosity are, as a rule, to be checked directly against key originals or colour-managed high-resolution sources.

4The Time Gap of Testimony and Recollection

The 2004–2005 oral history is a key source for reconstructing his life and work, but it is not the same as his intention at the time works were made decades earlier. For example, the 2005 statement linking Typhoon of 1983 to political resistance is used not as direct testimony from the time of making but as later self-interpretation. Family testimony likewise states when it was first recorded and its context, and is distinguished from the facts of the canvas and contemporary documents.

5Bibliography Still to Be Settled

The exact place of publication, year, pages and original text of Carole Neves’s “The Painter and the Sea: Byun Shi-Ji,” Hong Seong-hu’s “Beyond Boundaries: The Life and Art of Byun Shi-Ji” and “The Language of Painting” will be settled before publication. For the Smithsonian exhibition record, catalogues of the Japanese Kōfūkai and solo exhibitions, and material on the 1981 ink painting exhibition, institutional records take priority. These items are procedures for the verifiability of citations rather than the content of interpretation.

6The Scope of the Theory

“Fūdo modernism” is not the artist’s own term or the name of a historical movement but this book’s analytical category. It does not encompass every work under one concept. Upright figures, crowded canvases, many-coloured works and commissioned works not directly connected with fūdo are not used as direct evidence of fūdo iconography. They are treated, however, as contrasting cases for testing whether the painter’s formal choices operate beyond regional subject matter. The purpose of the theory is not to remove exceptions but to delimit precisely the range it can explain while bearing those exceptions.