Research/Fūdo Is Not Landscape/Argument VI
Academic edition · Fūdo Is Not Landscape · Argument VI · 19 / 34
Fūdo Organizes Posture
Body, Tree, House
Wind is not painted directly, but it leaves traces of relation in the tilt, lowness and direction of bodies, trees and houses. Here “posture” is not limited to the human body. Including the tilt of a grown tree and the lowness of a house people built, the chapters compare how fūdo organizes the forms of different beings and structures.
Structure of the argument
- Claim
- Fūdo does not force the same shape on body, tree and house, but it organizes relations of posture such as tilt, lowness and direction.
- Evidence in the works
- The tilt, height and direction in In the Wind (1984), Storm (1984), The Tree That Reaches Toward the Sky (2007) and Longing (1996) are compared.
- Primary sources
- The 2005 oral account that thatched roofs were tied down and wind paths left in the stone walls; passages in Art and Fūdo on Jeju thatched houses and the wind.
- Counter-examples
- The figure in The Beggar (1979) stands straight, filling almost the full height of the picture, and the horse in The Gaze (2001) also stands upright. Tilt is not a condition of every body; it is a form that stands out in scenes that enter into relation with the wind.
- Limits of the sources
- There is no evidence proving that the tilt in the paintings is a direct result of actual wind, ecological or architectural conditions. The causal link between analysis of the works and environmental data must not be overstated.
- Difference from existing art history
- Posture is not reduced at once to a symbol of suffering or defeat; it is read as a formal adjustment in relation to an outside force. Relational embodiment is stressed instead of environmental determinism.
- Provisional conclusion
- Tilt and lowness are not meanings in themselves but recurring relations of form. Their meaning is bounded by the arrangement of each work and by counter-examples.