Argument II · Homecoming Is Not a Return to Origin but Relearning

Homecoming is not a simple return to a remembered home. A place returned to after long absence is familiar and strange at once, and in that strangeness the painter had to relearn the conditions of looking, colour, distance and daily life. Jeju became a “method” not at the moment of arrival but after staying, walking and looking again had built up.

Structure of the argument

Claim

Homecoming is not a return to the starting point. It is a long relearning: seeing again, dwelling again and learning again in a once-familiar place.

Evidence in the works

Through The Empty House (1987), Jeju (1976) and later canvases, and The Path Rejoined (1998), the chapters trace how staying, looking again and the path change form.

Primary sources

Oral testimony on how he settled in Jeju in 1975; the recollection that “it was Jeju only on the surface, not in content”; and the 1988 statement that “Jeju is … an aesthetic ground and a method.”

Counter-examples

The bright, varied colours of Jeju (1976) and Seogwipo (1977) show that he painted Jeju subjects actively from just after his return. They also show that the later form, centred on the color of dried grass and the black line, was not complete at once. There was a time lag between the return of subject matter and the establishment of form.

Limits of the sources

Accounts of the 1975 settlement rely heavily on later oral testimony. They must be checked against records of appointment and residence at the time and the dates of the early Jeju works.

Difference from existing art history

Homecoming is seen not only as the recovery of identity or a national return to origins, but as a temporal process in which perception and working habits readapt to a place.

Provisional conclusion

Jeju was his birthplace, but a pictorial home was not given at once. Time lay between the return of subject matter and the relearning of form.

Structure of the argument

Chapters testing this argument — Chapters 4–5