The Oral History — A Research Guide
There is a record in which the painter speaks about his own work.
Seven sessions, from 3 December 2004 to 1 April 2005. Fourteen hours in all.
He was seventy-eight.
This page sets out what the record is, and what this archive has established from it.
1. The record
Copyright rests with Arts Council Korea. This archive quotes only in excerpt, for research and criticism.
2. The sessions
| No. | Date | Subject |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 3 Dec 2004 | Birth and youth — Jeju and Osaka; the Osaka School of Fine Arts |
| 2 | 4 Dec 2004 | Tokyo — under Terauchi; the Kōfū Prize; solo exhibitions; the return |
| 3 | 24 Dec 2004 | Return, and the Korean art world of the 1950s–60s — the homecoming exhibition; portraits |
| 4 | 28 Dec 2004 | The Seoul years — Sorabol College; under surveillance; giving form to the storm |
| 5 | 18 Jan 2005 | The Jeju years — the move; from the Biwon manner to the Jeju manner; Chusa |
| 6 | 19 Jan 2005 | Art and Pungto I — the primal landscape of Jeju; 4·3; teaching |
| 7 | 1 Apr 2005 | Art and Pungto II — a world of his own; the yellow; landscapes of the mind |
3. Eight things this record establishes
Each rests on the painter's own words.
① The date and route of his return
Forty-seven years later he still had the date exactly.
What changed — we had written that he came by ship. He came by air.
Then how did the twenty-six Japan-period canvases reach the 1958 Hwashin retrospective?
A new question for research.
Session 2, "The Return"
② 110 × 83 cm — why he cut the canvas
A standard F50 measures 117 × 91. His canvases measure 110 × 83 — seven centimetres shorter on each side.
He explained it. If you paint only the figure, an emptiness opens on either side; it gets in the way, so painters put a table or a vase behind the sitter. But he was painting the person because the person was beautiful — why bring in such things? It was meaningless. So he cut the F50 down to the size of one figure.
Not only the canvas. He had the stretchers made specially, and the frames too. No ready-made frame would fit.
He called it a form of his own — "my own F50."
What changed — this is not subtraction. It is choosing.
Not what shall I leave out, but what is most beautiful here — decide that first, keep it alone.
He cut the canvas to the size of the one beautiful thing. The order is the reverse.
Session 2, "The Kōfūkai and the highest award"
③ What the storm means ★
This is the heaviest passage in the archive.
The sub-headings of the fourth session run in this order:
"Under government surveillance" → "Caught in the schemes of the intelligence services" → "Giving form to the storm"
And then he says it. As the people of Jeju are battered by storms — he too was battered, after his return to Korea, by the investigative agencies. The resistance to that battering became the storm. He raised it into art.
And he adds:
"Ordinarily no one knows."
What changed — we had read his storms as the weather of Jeju.
That is true. But it was not only that.
A back bent before the wind was a posture before nature, and a posture before his time.
Session 4, "Giving form to the storm"
④ Where the colour of dry grass came from
Not from a theory.
He was sitting on a beach and he saw it. The sun struck so hard that white things went past white and turned yellow. If one had to name Jeju by a single colour, he thought, it would be that yellow. That was where he began.
And the colour leads to galjung-i — cloth dyed with the juice of unripe persimmons. White soiled too easily; people too poor for white wore this instead.
A colour made by poverty.
What changed — the colour is observation, not idea.
And it came from life, not aesthetics.
Session 7, "The pungto of Jeju and Jeju painting"
⑤ The Biwon was "an aristocratic culture"
Of the Biwon — the Secret Garden he had painted for more than a decade — he says:
"An aristocratic culture. Not a common one."
Jeju, he says, is the very bottom even of common life. And so he threw away all of that elegant, splendid colour.
What changed — the Biwon years were not a turn "from people to nature."
It was a garden where kings had walked. And he left it.
The period is not a break. It is a long silence.
Session 5, "From the Biwon manner to the Jeju manner"
⑥ Why almost nothing survives from 1975–76
On arriving in Jeju he threw everything away.
The colour. The technique. Even the stretcher. He cut the cloth with scissors, painted, and if it failed he wiped it out where he stood.
What changed — those two empty years are not a lull. They are demolition.
At twenty-three he cut down the F50. At fifty he abandoned the frame itself.
Twenty-seven years apart, the same hand is doing the same thing.
Session 5, "From the Biwon manner to the Jeju manner"
⑦ He read mukansa as freedom
The standing entitlement to submit to the Nitten without passing its jury — what the period sources call mukansa (無鑑査) or ishoku shuppin (依囑出品).
We had read it as a privilege.
He read it as freedom.
Had he stayed in Japan, he says, the weight of master-and-pupil lineage would have kept him from daring such a manner. But in Korea he was a member, so there was no jury to pass, and it did not matter what anyone said — so he simply sent the work.
What changed — he could do it because he had left.
Mukansa was not a privilege. It was the freedom that distance gave him.
Session 5
⑧ He submitted to the Kōfūkai "every year"
He said the Kōfūkai catalogue arrived every year, and he knew the count: "It's the 90th now." That was 2004.
In the atelier survives his entry to the 92nd Kōfūkai Exhibition of 2006 — The Island of Storms. He was eighty.
What changed — the published chronology records submissions only to the 71st (1985).
In fact they run from the 42nd (1956) to the 92nd (2006) — fifty years.
The storms he painted in Jeju, he sent to Tokyo every year.
Sessions 5 and 6
4. Four received ideas it overturns
5. How to read this record
Oral testimony is not a document. And yet it can go deeper than one.
Memory fails. No one recalls forty-year-old events exactly. There are dates in this record that do not hold.
But testimony says what documents cannot.
Why the storm is a storm; why he cut the canvas; where the yellow came from —
no document holds any of it. We know because he said it.
The principle of this archive
- - Testimony is marked as testimony, and kept distinct from documents.
- - Dates, exhibition numbers and other matters of fact are cross-checked against documents.
- - Where document and testimony disagree, both are recorded, and the disagreement is stated.
6. Consulting the original
The full transcript may be consulted at the Digital Archive of Korean Arts (DA-Arts).
The passages quoted here are excerpts, rendered as spoken; repetitions have been trimmed, but no wording or order has been altered.
Copyright rests with Arts Council Korea.
This archive quotes for research and criticism only, and does not reproduce the transcript.
7. Related pages
Our thanks to Lee In-beom and to Arts Council Korea.
Without this record, half of this archive would not exist.