From Jeju Painting to Fūdo Modernism

Beyond Local Colour: Formulating an Analytical Category

1The Name the Painter Gave

An old man on a cliff, a single boat, sea and land the color of dried grass, black lines laid upon them. These are the pictures seen in Arguments IV and V (chapters 8–11) and, before them, in the subtraction of chapter 7, case B.

Byun Shi-Ji gave these pictures a name himself: “Jeju painting” (Jeju-hwa).¹ And yet he stated that the essence he pursued lay in a universality beyond Jeju: feelings, such as longing and waiting, that can connect with different experiences of life.²

The name points to one island, but the essence goes beyond the island. This chapter redefines the analytical term proposed in the introduction, “fūdo modernism,” in light of the results of Arguments IV and V. It does not seek to change the painter’s name. It seeks to explain, within that name, how pictures formed on one island can be read again in other places.

2Local Colour: Colonial Institutions and the Colonial Gaze

In Korean modern art, “local colour” (hyangtosaek) was not a neutral name for regionality. At the Joseon Art Exhibition of the 1920s and 1930s, “regional colour” and “peninsular colour” were actively encouraged by Japanese jurors, and subjects such as thatched houses, white clothing and genre figures were repeated as devices representing “Koreanness.” Later, Korean critics criticized this subject-centredness and the colonial gaze, and sought a “Korean” beauty in another sense.³

Reading Byun Shi-Ji’s Jeju painting only as an extension of local colour therefore confuses the presence of regional iconography with formal specificity. What this book asks is not “what Jeju-like thing he painted” but “how living long in Jeju changed the structure of his painting.”

If local colour concentrates on presenting regional markers on the canvas, fūdo focuses on the process by which perception, body and time reorganize form. This distinction is also needed to secure a historical distance between colonial-period discourse on local colour and Byun Shi-Ji’s late painting.

3What the Arguments on Form Found

Chapter 7, case B, and the four chapters of Arguments IV and V (chapters 8–11) each looked at one small thing. The less was left, the more work what remained did. Fūdo was not landscape but a condition that changes the way of seeing. One small boat made a far place. The canvas reads as flat, yet distance remained. The color of dried grass was not the colour of any one thing but a colour made by sun, wind and time. The black line divided, conveyed the direction of force and set up posture. Empty space was where fūdo spreads without figures. Light did not come from one side but spread within the colour.

Seen one by one, these are small observations. Gathered together, they point one way: fūdo changed the form of the canvas.

4Reading the Name “Jeju Painting”

“Jeju painting” can be read more broadly than “pictures that depict Jeju.” The Jeju painting seen in Arguments IV and V had recurring forms. In that sense this book tries reading “Jeju painting” as a term that includes not only the name of a subject but a way of painting.

That way came out of Jeju. But the heart that watches a distant boat, the time of waiting for someone, the wish to go back do not belong to any one island. The universal the painter spoke of was not gained by erasing the traces of Jeju. It was feelings, like longing and waiting, that can be reinterpreted in other cultures too.

The universal is not the opposite of the local. It lies at the end of feeling that has passed deeply through the local.

5Fūdo Modernism as an Analytical Category

“Fūdo modernism” is not a term the painter used, nor a recognized movement in existing art history. This book proposes it as an analytical category. Its purpose is not to fix Jeju painting as a new “-ism” but to explain that elements classified as regionality may actually be principles of transformation of pictorial form.⁴

This category has four conditions. First, a language of modern painting acquired elsewhere exists. Second, through long dwelling in a particular place, habits of perception and body change. Third, that change appears not only in iconography but as a reorganization of form such as line, colour, space, scale and repetition. Fourth, regionality is not erased in order to gain universality but turned into a translatable form.

This definition is a device to avoid both environmental determinism and regionalism. Rather than saying that fūdo “makes” form, it is more accurate to say that form takes shape as the painter’s skills and memories are rearranged within a fūdo.

For Byun Shi-Ji that place was Jeju, but the concept itself is not limited to Jeju. To apply it to other places and other artists, the same four conditions must be tested through works and sources.

Fūdo modernism is therefore less a conclusion than a research hypothesis. The remaining chapters of this book test its explanatory power through questions of body, labour, movement and translation.

Fūdo is not subject matter but a condition of form. When this proposition holds, Jeju painting goes beyond the category of regional painting.

The process can be reduced to three steps. Fūdo is not landscape. Fūdo enters the body. Fūdo that has entered the body becomes form.

He made a form that passed deeply through one place, Jeju, and that form gained the possibility of being translated into new meanings in other places. What Arguments IV and V treated was the place of the boat, distance, colour, line, empty space and light—the forms of sight. Argument VI examines the second step of this hypothesis, the process by which fūdo enters the body, in the posture of bodies on the canvas; its first chapter, chapter 12, begins with the body that meets the wind.

The name came from one island. Longing crosses the island.