Research/Fūdo Is Not Landscape/Argument I
Academic edition · Fūdo Is Not Landscape · Argument I · 2 / 34
Modernity Is Reconstructed in Motion
From Imperial Western-Style Painting to a Seoul Way of Looking
This argument does not reduce Byun Shi-Ji’s form to “a provincial variant of Western painting learned in Japan.” Art education, exhibitions and the language environment of Osaka and Tokyo, and long observation in the Biwon gardens of Seoul retrained his painting technique within different institutions and places. Modernity is read not as the arrival of a finished style but as a process in which moving skills and a moving body are reorganized each time.
Structure of the argument
- Claim
- Byun Shi-Ji’s modernity is not the peripheral reception of a completed Western style. It is a product of movement, repeatedly reconstructed through Western-style painting education in Osaka and Tokyo, the exhibition system, and long observation in Seoul’s Biwon.
- Evidence in the works
- The modelling and figure rendering of Self-Portrait (1944), the pose and hands of Portrait of Mr. K (1952), and the fine rendering of roof tiles and reflections in Autumn at Aeryeonjeong (1971) are seen on one continuous line.
- Primary sources
- Passages in the Byun Shi-Ji Oral History Transcript on the Osaka Art School, Terauchi Manjirō and the Biwon; Art and Fūdo; and a 1958 newspaper column that mentions “customs and habits, local things, fūdo.”
- Counter-examples
- Form did not change at once when place changed. Continuity remains between the detailed rendering of the Seoul years and the bright, many-coloured surface of Jeju (1976), made just after the return home. This refutes the strong causal claim that movement in itself produces a change of form.
- Limits of the sources
- The year he entered the Osaka Art School is given variously as 1941 or 1942, and must be settled from the school’s original records. For exhibition history, official catalogues take priority.
- Difference from existing art history
- Rather than a model in which style spreads one way from centre to periphery, this book sees a process in which imperial art institutions and the moving body of a painter retrain skill in several places.
- Provisional conclusion
- Jeju painting is not a negation of the Japan and Seoul years. It is accumulated skill rearranged under different conditions.