Research/Fūdo Is Not Landscape/Argument III
Academic edition · Fūdo Is Not Landscape · Argument III · 9 / 34
Representation Passes Through Repetition and Subtraction to Become Expression
Repetition, Compression, Translation of Medium
This argument does not explain Byun Shi-Ji’s Jeju painting with the linear scheme of “a shift from representation to expression.” Repeatedly painting the same subject, the anatomy of figure painting and the fine description of the Biwon were not discarded; they were the ground that made subtraction possible. The argument redefines xieyi (寫意, painting the idea) not as an essential difference between East and West but as a matter of compression and translation of medium that passes through representation.
Structure of the argument
- Claim
- The expressiveness of the Jeju years did not come from abandoning the training of representation. It formed by passing through exact representational skill in repetition, and then subtracting what was unnecessary.
- Evidence in the works
- The repetition and difference of the two Ieodo paintings (1980, 1987); the pose of Portrait of Mr. K and the detail of the Biwon paintings; the later A Single Dot (2006) and the black line; the ink experiments of 1981.
- Primary sources
- “The figure allows no tricks”; the oral account of cutting the canvas to fit the figure; the conclusion of the Tokyo years that “what is simple is beautiful”; the artist’s note that “a line comes into being by giving up colour”; and the essay “Delacroix and Laozi” in Art and Fūdo.
- Counter-examples
- Some works, such as Boisterous Dance (1997), actively fill the surface with many forms and movements. Subtraction is not a law that grows stronger in one direction over time; it is a choice that appears strongly in particular groups of works. And since figures such as the old man, the horse, the house and the boat remain to the end, the work cannot be explained as a straight evolution toward abstraction.
- Limits of the sources
- Xieyi is not the artist’s own term defining all his oil paintings; it is this book’s analytical term. The source of the Delacroix quotation and the bibliographic details of the 1981 ink painting exhibition must be confirmed.
- Difference from existing art history
- Instead of the essentialist binary “West = representation, East = expression,” the book sees a process in which the artist chose and translated concepts from East and West to explain his own medium and education.
- Provisional conclusion
- Byun Shi-Ji’s subtraction is not the opposite of representation but representation in a compressed state. Expression rests on what a trained eye and hand have left behind.