Key Terms and Analytical Categories

The meanings of the words used in this book. Chapters in parentheses treat each term in detail.

Core Analytical Categories

Fūdo: In this book, not the features of a region but the condition of a “lived place” in which body, climate, daily life, time and social memory are entangled. Watsuji Tetsurō’s theory of fūdo and Berque’s discussion of milieu serve as comparative coordinates, but Byun Shi-Ji’s concept of fūdo is not reduced to them. (Introduction / Chapter 8 / Chapter 20)
Posture: The outward shape of the way a body enters into relation with the forces around it, read in three layers: tilt, height and direction. In Arguments VI–VIII it belongs to the painted body; in the account of repetition in chapter 6 it is also the attitude of the one who paints. (Chapter 12 / Chapter 6)
The Aesthetics of Not Fighting: A pictorial form that does not make the forces of nature an object of conquest but sustains relation through lowering, tilting and stillness. Not fighting does not mean not enduring; it means not trying to defeat nature. It is not a phrase that erases resistance. (Introduction / Chapter 16)
The Posture of Resistance: The layer of relation with historical and political forces. It refers to the place where the tenacity of resistance and the feeling toward dictatorship that the painter spoke of in his 2005 oral history meet the subjects of his works, and is treated not as intention at the time of making but as later self-interpretation. It is not a phrase that makes every bent body a political symbol. (Introduction / Chapter 16)
The Form of the Bent Body: The pictorial place where the two layers meet without becoming the same; the way bending, tilt, lowness and stillness become a relational grammar of the canvas. (Chapter 16)
Jeju Painting: The name the painter himself gave his pictures. This book reads it as a term including not only the name of a subject but a way of painting. (Theoretical interim conclusion)
Fūdo Modernism: Not the painter’s own term or the name of a historical movement, but a testable analytical hypothesis this book proposes. It refers to the process by which the language of modern painting acquired elsewhere is reconstituted, through movement and long dwelling, within perception, bodily habit and working process, and that change appears in the layers of line, colour, space, scale and repetition. In English the explanatory phrase “a modernism of milieu” is used rather than a proper name of a movement, and the Korean 풍토 itself is written pungto. This notation is limited to the academic print edition; the general-reader edition and the byunshiji.org archive, including this web edition, use Fūdo. (Chapter 20)
The Color of Dried Grass: This book’s interpretive name, from the viewpoint of temporality, for the yellowish-brown range of the late canvases often called ochre. It is not the painter’s own colour name. Based on the artist’s testimony that colours turn yellow under strong sun, it gives the colour a temporal meaning: a colour that was alive, went through sun and wind, and remains.
Subtraction: In many late pictures, things grow fewer, colours are reduced and empty space widens. Not poverty, but a way of gathering work into what remains. (Chapter 7)
Exile and Blessing: In his lifetime the painter called his life exile, and the work of painting a blessing. This book reads exile as a figure for a state of life—being away from home and not fully reaching it even after returning—and blessing as the capacity of work to turn the conditions of life into form. (Conclusion)

Words for Looking at Pictures

Form: The structure that makes up a picture, such as line, colour and composition. (Chapter 8)
Eye Level: In linear perspective, the horizon of the picture is placed at the viewer’s eye level. (Chapter 8)
Perspective: A method of making depth on a flat surface by the principle that near things look large and far things small. Linear perspective draws parallel lines converging on one distant point; aerial perspective blurs colour and form with distance. (Chapter 8 / Chapter 9)
Inherent Colour: The colour a thing is thought to have by nature: the red of an apple, the green of a leaf. (Chapter 10)
Conditioned Colour: The text distinguishes the optically conditioned colour of Impressionism from Byun Shi-Ji’s colour system of long duration. The latter is not declared to belong to the same category of “conditioned colour,” but explained as colour relations in which the sun, wind and time of a particular place have converged through repeated work.
Local Colour: In Korean modern art, a term for painting the landscape and people, life and colours of a locality to bring out its character. It was widely debated around the Joseon Art Exhibition of the 1920s–30s. (Theoretical interim conclusion)
Empty Space: A place where only colour remains, without figures or lines. In this book empty space is not an empty place but a place where fūdo spreads without figures. (Chapter 11)
Colour Field: A surface painted broadly in one colour. His late canvases are made of bright colour fields and black lines.
Value Contrast: The difference between light and dark. On his canvases, value contrast is made not by light and shadow but by light colour and black. (Chapter 11)
Volume: The effect by which the modelling of light and shadow makes things look round and full, as if one could hold them. (Chapter 9)
Flatness: The fact that the picture surface is flat; an important question of modernist painting. He accepted the flat surface while keeping distance. (Chapter 9)
Modernism: The various currents of art that appeared from the late nineteenth century on; modern painting that asked how to paint as much as what to paint. (Chapter 8)
Impressionism: A current of painters in late nineteenth-century France who went outdoors to capture light and colour just as the eye sees them, rather than colours fixed in the studio. (Chapter 10)
Series: Pictures painting the same thing in succession. (Chapter 10)
Motif: A subject or form that recurs in a painter’s pictures. (Chapter 17)
The Six Principles: Six criteria for judging painting set out by Xie He of the Southern Qi in sixth-century China. The second, gufa yongbi (骨法用筆, bone method in using the brush), is the method of setting up a skeleton with the brush. (Chapter 10)
Xingsi (形似) and Xieyi (寫意): In East Asian painting theory, painting to resemble outward appearance, and painting the meaning and spirit within. This book calls the way of working that sought to convey meaning with oil paint and canvas “xieyi written in oil.” (Chapter 7)
Ink Painting: Painting in ink. He first showed ink paintings in 1981. (Chapter 7)

Words for Sources

Oral History: A record of spoken words taken down. The oral history in this book is the Byun Shi-Ji Oral History Transcript, recorded in seven sessions from December 2004 to April 2005. (Introduction / Chapter 4)
Artist’s Notes: Records written by the painter. “What is not painted holds up what is painted” comes from the painter’s notes (author’s confirmation). “A line comes into being by giving up colour” comes from the artist’s notes printed in the collection The Way of the Wind: Byun Shi-Ji. (Chapter 11 / Chapter 7) The same sentences are partly confirmed in handwritten Notebook 2 (notes to chapters 10 and 11), but since they may be summaries of things he read, they are not declared to be the painter’s own creations.
The 100 Works: The hundred plates published on byunshiji.org. The plates in this book were chosen from them, and each picture’s number (FŪDO 000) is given in the notes and the list of plates.

Contents · Fūdo Is Not Landscape