Modernism Rewritten from the Margins

1The Fūdo of Rome

In October 1981 his paintings hung at the Galleria Astrolabio in Rome. It was an exhibition the gallery organized by invitation.¹ He left the exhibition to the gallery and set off to sketch. He went south from Rome as far as the seaside town of Sorrento, and to France as well.²

Later he said of Rome at that time: “That fūdo is what matters.” In a place like Rome, he said, everything one sees is artistic, so everything one paints becomes a work.³

For him fūdo was not something found only in Jeju. Where, among the world’s art, do his pictures, grown in the fūdo of Jeju, stand?

2Not from Centre to Periphery, but Rewriting from the Margins

Twentieth-century art history long produced a linear narrative in which innovations arising in central cities spread to the periphery.⁴

Partha Mitter’s discussion of decentring criticizes the view that reads non-Western art as a belated derivative of the Western canon.⁵ Neighbouring discussions that have raised the plurality of modernity and the provincializing of European categories have posed the same problem in other disciplines.^{6 7}

This view lets us see Byun Shi-Ji not only as a “regional variant” of styles learned in Japan and Europe, but as a case in which the problems of modern painting were newly constituted in Jeju.

Byun Shi-Ji’s own writing has sentences that resonate with this. While speaking of a common undercurrent beneath the diversity of modern art, he held that the conditions of people, era and climate become the matrix of art. He did not set the universal and the local as mutually exclusive.⁸

In this book, then, modernism is understood not as a list of styles but as a historical field that constantly re-examines the relations of representation, flatness, colour, line, medium and subject. Byun Shi-Ji’s place is not where the centre was imitated at the edge of that field, but where its questions were reconstituted under different conditions.

3Form Moves, and Place Transforms Form

On his 1981 European journey he painted the landscapes of Rome, Sorrento and France in his own technique, and on returning transferred the sketches into oil.⁹ Neves wrote that the technique of some of these European pictures foreshadows his later Jeju paintings.¹⁰ What matters is what differences the same hand and technique make as they pass through different places.

Conversely, his recollection that the images of architecture and cities he saw in Europe made him see the buildings of Jeju National University anew shows that sight did not move in one direction only.³ It was not that style was transmitted from centre to periphery; experience passing through many places renewed each place’s visuality.

Such two-way movement lets us see fūdo modernism not as an isolated regionalism but as a process of movement and reconstruction.

4Comparative Art History: Different Ways the Land Becomes Form

The purpose of setting the work of Anselm Kiefer and Andy Goldsworthy beside Byun Shi-Ji is not to tie the three artists into one category. The question of the comparison is one: through what mediation does place become the form of the work in each case?

In Kiefer’s work the land appears as historical memory and the weight of matter. Materials such as photographs, sand, straw and lead materialize German history and the scars of the land.¹¹ Place adheres to the surface as actual matter.

In Goldsworthy’s site-specific work, local materials such as stone, ice and leaves and the act of making combine directly with the time of a place. The work arises as an event within the place rather than depicting it.¹²

In Byun Shi-Ji’s case, place does not enter by attaching earth or stone to the canvas. Through long dwelling and repeated observation it is converted into a pictorial grammar: the tilt of the line, the convergence of colour, the reduction of figures, the widening of empty space. He wrote that what was permitted to him was “to live silently in nature, to be moved by nature and to think, and to carry on formal activity.”¹³

The differences among the three artists show that “placeness” is not one style but has various structures of mediation. Byun Shi-Ji’s distinctiveness lies less in the matter of place itself than in the translation between a body that lived a place and pictorial form.

5The Place of Fūdo Modernism

In Rome he said he had come not so much to sell works as to show them.¹⁴ After returning from Europe he said he had gained confidence in the pictures he painted in Jeju.¹⁵ There is no need to read these statements as the modesty of a peripheral painter. They can rather be seen as an attitude of testing how his work looks within another field of art.

Fūdo modernism is not a project to reject the centre or to set up a new centre. Nor is it the same concept as the “aesthetics of not fighting” of chapter 16. But there is a structural similarity, in that it does not take a single centre as the only norm and compares the forms of different places while keeping their differences. Fūdo modernism is an analytical framework that does not set the standard of modernism as a norm derived from a single centre, but compares how form is newly constituted in different places.

The regionality of Jeju, then, is not a trace to be removed in order to enter world art history. It is rather the concrete condition that makes international comparison possible. The task is to explain regionality not by mythologizing it as an essence of “uniqueness” but as a process of formal transformation.

The form grown in the fūdo of Jeju is not cut off from the world; it enters into an asymmetric but equal relation of comparison with the forms of other places.