Repetition and Difference

The Ieodo Series and the Form of Memory

1The Crow That Came Again

In Ieodo (1987) an empty boat has reached the shore, and a crow has alighted beside it.¹ The boat is drawn small and black at the lower right of the picture, and the crow stands right beside it. Ieodo (1980), seven years earlier, also had an empty boat with a single crow beside it.

The same title, the same pair. But not the same picture. Under the title Ieodo alone there are several works from 1977 to 2005.²

Why did he paint the same thing again and again? While painting it again and again, what stayed the same, and what changed?

2Reverence and Form: Repetition Is Not the Reproduction of Sameness

Byun Shi-Ji said he thought deeply every time he painted the sea. His reverence for the sea does not change, but the pictures differ with the season, the time of day and changes in the air.³ In these words repetition can be read not as copying the same image but as work that sustains the tension between an unchanging attitude and a changing form.

Boat, crow, horse and house reappear, changing size and position, distance and colour from year to year and work to work. This repetition can be seen less as making Jeju into a fixed symbol than as reconstructing the relation between memory and work each time.

3The Same Motif, a Changing Form

Placed side by side, the two Ieodo paintings of 1980 and 1987 show that repetition produces difference. The relation of empty boat and crow is kept, but the size and position of the boat, its distance from the crow, the ground colour, the density of brushwork and the proportion of empty space change.

The unit for reading the series is therefore the change of relations more than individual things. One must trace at what distance the same motif is placed, how small it becomes, and in what colour field it is isolated or joined.

This difference also has to do with how memory works. He did not paint from photographs. He said that painting only from photographs kills the imagination, and that what is seen with the eyes and “learned in the head” is “more accurate even than a photograph.”⁴ A motif that has passed through memory becomes not a representation of the same object but a relation reconstructed each time. So his sea is always the same and a little different each time he paints it.

Seen this way, repetition can be read not as a way of possessing a place but as a way of renewing his relation with it.

4The Mountain of Home, the Sea of Home

The French painter Cézanne (1839–1906) painted again and again Mont Sainte-Victoire, which overlooks his home town of Aix-en-Provence in the south. In a letter of 1878 he called the mountain “a beautiful motif.” From about then until his death in 1906 there are some eighty oils and watercolours. In his last years he painted looking at the mountain from around his studio at Les Lauves, north of Aix.⁵ Byun Shi-Ji too wrote of Cézanne in Art and Fūdo: that Cézanne found a principle through “ceaseless observation of nature.”⁶

Both men painted the landscape of home repeatedly into old age. There are differences too. Cézanne painted facing the mountain. Byun Shi-Ji looked at the sea, came home and painted in the house.

A few weeks before he died, Cézanne wrote to his son that as a painter he was coming to see more clearly before nature, but that realizing what he felt was always very difficult.⁷ Byun Shi-Ji too said he was about seventy or eighty percent satisfied with his work, adding that complete satisfaction cannot be achieved.⁸

5The Brush That Has Already Passed

Painting again is not copying. In his book he wrote that imitation is “not copying but the spirit of creation.”⁹ According to Neves, he believed that imprinting the relation of people and nature again and again could give rise to a new consciousness, beyond a memorable picture.¹⁰

In his last years, he said, he sometimes began two pictures together, and took up the brush only after long thought. If something good came by chance and he touched it to make it better, it vanished, and he “can’t put it back. It’s already passed.” So he tried, carefully, for “one completion.”¹¹

A brush that has passed cannot be taken back. Instead of taking it back, he painted again.

Between the two Ieodo paintings, the size of the boat and the distance between crow and boat changed. This chapter has confirmed that his repetition was a matter of correcting form again and again on the basis of an unchanging attitude. Then what did he try to grasp by painting again: the outward look of the sea, or the meaning within it? The next chapter takes up this question with the word xieyi (寫意), and looks also, in A Single Dot (2006), at what he subtracted from the canvas for the sake of that meaning.

His posture before the sea was the same. The pictures were never the same.