Research/Fūdo Is Not Landscape/Argument IV
Academic edition · Fūdo Is Not Landscape · Argument IV · 12 / 34
Fūdo Is a System of Sight and Distance
Horizon, Distant Boat, Flatness
Fūdo is not a background behind the picture but a way of organizing the position and distance of looking. The wavering horizon, the distant boat set near it, and the flattened surface with reduced depth loosen the fixed place of the observer while still keeping distance.
Structure of the argument
- Claim
- Fūdo is not a background image. It is a system of sight and distance that organizes the relations of eye level, horizon, distant boat and near ground. Even as flatness grows stronger, that distance does not disappear.
- Evidence in the works
- The relations of horizon, boat and foreground in A Wavering Horizon (2005) and Tropical Sun (1983) are analysed.
- Primary sources
- The sentence in Art and Fūdo that defines Jeju as “an aesthetic ground and a method,” and the artist’s testimony and writings on the sea and the fūdo of Jeju.
- Counter-examples
- In some works, such as Plowing (1979), a nearby scene of labour rather than a distant boat or horizon organizes the picture. The grammar of distance is not the only spatial system covering all of the Jeju painting. And since the small boat, the horizon and differences of scale are also devices of traditional perspective, Byun Shi-Ji cannot be declared an anti-perspectival painter.
- Limits of the sources
- The frequency and period distribution of the horizon and boat motifs cannot be generalized from the 100 Works alone. The whole corpus must be checked.
- Difference from existing art history
- Fūdo is moved from regional subject matter—“what was painted”—to a relational visual structure—“from where, and how, it was seen.” He is not placed as a “late case” in a Greenbergian narrative of flatness.
- Provisional conclusion
- Byun Shi-Ji did not abandon perspective. He kept distance on the flat surface, while loosening the viewpoint of a fixed observer.