Other Paths in Contemporary Korean Painting

1The Question of Contemporaneity: The Art Worlds of Jeju and Seoul in 1975

That Byun Shi-Ji settled in Jeju in 1975 is not merely a biographical event in which one painter left Seoul and went home. That moment coincides with a time when Korean painting was rapidly forming different languages of modernity: postwar abstraction, experimental art, monochrome painting. Before comparing his Jeju painting with world modernism, then, it needs first to be placed within the field of Korean painting of the same era.

The narrative of Korean modern art was never a single internal development. As The Space Between: The Modern in Korean Art, co-organized by LACMA and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, shows, Western painting was reconstructed as it passed through imperial-era movement and education mediated by Japan,¹ new international influences after Liberation, including that of the United States, and the conditions of war and division.² Byun Shi-Ji’s route—Jeju, Osaka, Tokyo, Seoul, Jeju again—compresses these multiple mediations into one individual’s life.

The question, then, is not which movement of the day he “belonged to.” More important is how different pictorial problems coexisted within the same historical time, and which of them Byun Shi-Ji held on to steadily.

2Postwar Abstraction and the Reorganization of Form

In Korean art of the late 1950s and 1960s, postwar abstraction and Informel shook the norms of representation and brought to the fore the materiality of the surface, gesture and traces of action. Byun Shi-Ji passed through near-abstract experiments in Seoul in the same period (chapter 3), but did not stay long in that direction. His work kept passing through figure and landscape, the labouring body and close observation of the Biwon.

How the painter read Informel survives a little in his handwritten manuscripts. The Japanese manuscript “Abstract Painting and Reality” (images Image_20240121_0026–0028) describes Informel as a position that borrows no form from nature or objects, and names Mathieu as its representative. There is also a passage saying that if, asked what a canvas painted all black depicts, one answered “a crow in the night,” that would be Informel. The Korean notebook manuscript Nos. 185–186 (images img20240209_23560317 and 23571341) records that Tapié named this current in 1952, and that in the late fifties the relation between action and matière hardened and lost its freshness, leading to new currents in the sixties. These pages may be summaries of things he read, and their legibility is medium to low. Here we say only that the painter knew this current and noted its development to the end.

This difference matters. In Byun Shi-Ji’s late work, figures shrink but do not vanish. Old man, horse, house and boat are reduced almost to signs while keeping the coordinates of relation. His simplification, that is, is closer to minimizing representation than to abandoning it. As much as the figures shrink, they take on more spatial and emotional functions.

The binary that sees Byun Shi-Ji’s painting as figuration that failed to reach abstraction, or conversely places regional figuration outside modernism, is therefore inadequate. For him the problem of modernity lay less in a choice between abstraction and figuration than in how far he could subtract the representational language he had acquired while still leaving a relation with the world.

3Dansaekhwa and Byun Shi-Ji: Shared Reduction, Different Methods

From the 1970s on, Korean Dansaekhwa gained an important place in international art history through restraint of colour, repeated action, the material properties of its media and concentration on the surface of painting. Joan Kee analyses Dansaekhwa not simply as an expression of “Korean spirituality” but as a method of making—pushing, soaking, scraping, tearing, repeating.³ The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, likewise presents repeated action, the materiality of media and the minimizing of representation as features of 1970s monochrome painting.⁴

Byun Shi-Ji’s Jeju painting also shows a contemporary resonance: the number of colours shrinks, the surface flattens, and form condenses through recurring motifs and long work. But the differences are greater. If many Dansaekhwa works bring to the fore canvas, hanji, pigment and bodily action themselves as the problem of painting, Byun Shi-Ji’s canvases keep to the end a relational world of old man, horse, house, boat and horizon.

His color of dried grass can be compared with Dansaekhwa in its restraint to a single tonality, but its function is not the same. Before it is a field of material repetition, it is a colour that binds sky, sea and land within one climatic field. The black line, too, organizes the posture, distance and direction of bodies and things rather than being a trace of pure action.

Byun Shi-Ji’s monochromy, then, can neither be absorbed into Dansaekhwa nor placed opposite it. The two bodies of work handled the problems of “subtraction” and “the flat surface” in different ways in the same era. Through this difference the plurality within Korean modernism becomes clearer.

4Figuration Is Not Retreat

If the narrative of Korean contemporary art is written as a linear scheme of progress toward abstraction, Byun Shi-Ji’s small figures, horses and boats easily look like conservative remnants. But his late figures are not a return to academic representation. The volume and anatomical accuracy of the early figure paintings vanish, leaving only bodies close to a few lines and dots.

Here the figure becomes not the protagonist of a narrative but a device for measuring relations. The small boat becomes a unit of distance, the bent old man makes the force of the wind visible in his body, and the horse organizes stillness rather than motion. Figures constitute the relations of space, time and force on the canvas more than they “describe” anything.

Byun Shi-Ji’s figuration should therefore be read not as an unfinished remnant in relation to modernism but as a method that carried out flatness and reduction, repetition and the reduction of colour without abandoning the figure.

5Different Times Within One Era

That different pictorial languages existed in the same 1970s and 1980s leads us to ask not “who was further ahead” but “under what historical, social and local conditions which problems were chosen.” This is also why recent studies such as Korean Art from 1953 describe Korean contemporary art as a complex lineage of collision, innovation and interaction.⁵

Rather than rapidly updating the forms of the international avant-garde, Byun Shi-Ji repeated and reconstructed the oil painting he had already learned, for a long time, in one place. This slow reconstruction differs from the speed of contemporary art, but that difference is itself one aspect of contemporaneity. Modernity does not move by a single clock.

In this book, fūdo modernism is a micro-level concept for describing exactly this parallel modernity. It is neither a name that celebrates regionality nor a name for creating another movement in Korean contemporary art. It is an analytical framework that traces how a pictorial language acquired through movement is reorganized into a different form through long dwelling and work.

6His Place in Korean Art History

What this comparison shows is not a value judgment that Byun Shi-Ji is more “Korean” than Dansaekhwa or more independent than postwar abstraction. Rather, it shows that the modernity of Korean contemporary art cannot be reduced to abstraction, monochrome and experiment alone, and that another pictorial modernity, embracing figuration and place, labour and memory, existed in the same time.

Byun Shi-Ji’s late painting strengthened flatness without fully abandoning representation, kept the difference of place while reducing colour, and renewed memory through repetition without copying images identically. This combination lets us see the interior of Korean modernism as more plural.

Comparison with world art history, then, no longer skips over Korean art history. Only after passing through Western-style painting learned in Osaka and Tokyo, the painting of postwar Seoul and Korean modernism from the 1970s on can the comparison between Jeju and the world begin.