Seoul, 1957–1975
1. The Man Who Came Back
He was thirty-one.
In Japan he had won the Kōfū Prize; he was a member of the Kōfūkai, and one of its jurors.
He could submit to the Nitten without passing its jury — a standing entitlement the period sources call mukansa (無鑑査) or ishoku shuppin (依囑出品). <sup>[2]</sup>
He had held three solo exhibitions, in Tokyo and Osaka.
He was returning to a country he had left at six. It had been twenty-six years.
Before he left, his teacher Terauchi Manjirō wrote him a farewell.
Byun now leaves the Japan in which he has lived more than thirty years and returns to his homeland. We rejoice that he brings honour to his native place, yet we cannot suppress a trace of regret at his going.
— A Farewell to Byun, autumn 1957
On 2 November the Kōfūkai issued his certificate of membership.
Thirteen days later he flew.
Why he came back, he said once himself.
As I grew older I came to face a new necessity to fully know my own country. I belong to Korea, and it is in my country that I can develop something of my own.
2. May 1958 — Hwashin
The following spring he opened an exhibition.
A Retrospective of Oil Paintings by Ushiro Byun Shi-Ji
Hwashin Department Store, third-floor gallery. 23 May – 1 June. Sixty oils.
What was being looked back upon was his seventeen years in Japan. The title of the checklist says so: "Works of the Japan Period."
Twenty-six of the works had been painted in Tokyo and Osaka — Farm House (1943) from his student years, the Self-Portrait at twenty (1944), Woman in a Beret (1948) which had won the Kōfū Prize, FEMME (1947) accepted at the Nitten, and Afternoon (1950).
3. Six Thousand a Day
Both shows are drawing more than 6,000 visitors daily.
— The Korean Republic
Full to overflowing, day after day.
— Jeju Shinbo
The Chosun Ilbo called it "the first retrospective ever held in our country."
4. Three Kinds of Picture
The English-language paper divided the sixty into two.
Pyun's 60 oils are grouped into two types. One is marked by an academic influence and the other is abstract.
The academic — the grammar he had learned in Japan: figures, still lifes, exact flesh.
The abstract — Structure, Work, Figure and Still-life B. Pictures without titles; pictures with only numbers.
And in the checklist there was a third.
《Porter》. 《Woodsplit》. 《Cow and Two Men》.
Of the sixty, the one work the press reproduced was Porter.
5. What the Poet Saw
On 5 June a review appeared in the Kyunghyang Shinmun. It was written by Cho Byung-hwa, the poet.
He said he loved the paintings of the Tokyo years — White and Black Houses (1950), Figure (1949).
And he was uneasy about the new ones.
Art is, after all, the search for a fundamental beauty; it is not a curious rivalry of isms.
We must not become the slaves of schools and isms, gasping after our age.
— Cho Byung-hwa, Kyunghyang Shinmun, 5 June 1958
And he wrote:
"I love the works from before his return, and I should like to urge him back to that world."
How to read this review
Cho did not condemn any movement.
Painters who took the road of the isms in those same years found their own places there.
That a painting culture has several roads is a sign of its health.
What he wanted was one thing: that the painter find his own place.
It was 1958. The wave of abstraction was about to break over the Korean art world. The poet was watching, uneasily, as a painter of thirty-two turned his body toward it.
He was right.
Only, the painter's answer was not to go back to Tokyo.
Seventeen years later it was to go further — to the island.
6. The Faces He Painted
After his return he painted portraits.
Nos. 50–56 of the checklist: seven portraits.
Portrait of Dr. Y / Dr. K / Dr. K / Dr. S / Dr. R / Dr. P / Mrs. K
A list survives of the people he painted from life.
And the following year, Mapo High School sponsored his fifth solo exhibition, at the Central Public Information Hall, April 1959.
7. That September
Three months after the exhibition closed.
On 1 September 1958 he became a teacher at Mapo High School.
The order of ten months
He came back at the invitation of a university.
He held an exhibition, and six thousand people came each day.
Three months later he was issued a high-school teacher's card.
When the exhibition ended, the university ended too.
8. What Does Not Survive
What happened in between, no document records.
And we do not guess
We cannot write that the university pushed him out.
Two of its presidents, and a dean, entrusted their faces to him.
One does not sit for a portrait by a man one has driven away.
Nor can we write that he was welcomed.
Ten months later he went to a high school.
Both facts stand. And between them there is a gap.
In the Korea of 1958, certain things happened in a manner that leaves no record.
A letter of appointment survives; a reason for resignation does not.
That was the method of those years.
9. He Spoke Once
For close to fifty years he left no record of this.
No grievance, no explanation, no names.
Then, at seventy-eight, he said it once.
28 December 2004. The fourth session of the recorded oral history, at his home.
The sub-headings of that session run in this order:
"Under government surveillance"
"Caught in the schemes of the intelligence services"
"Giving form to the storm"
And he said:
The storm — in Jeju, people are battered by storms, aren't they? Thatch roofs blow away, the crops blow away.
Being battered by a storm; and being battered, after I came back to Korea, by the investigative agencies.
The resistance to that battering — the resistance became the storm…
I gave form to what was inside. I raised it into art. That is one of its meanings.
Ordinarily no one knows.
— Oral history, session 4, 2004
10. "Ordinarily No One Knows"
That single phrase explains forty-six years of silence.
He let it go unknown.
He did not ask to be understood.
It was not that he could not speak. He saw no need to.
We have read his storms as the weather of Jeju.
That is true. On that island the thatch does blow away, and the crops with it.
But the painter himself names another meaning.
Resistance to a battering.
And that resistance, set up as a picture.
A back bent before the wind is the posture of one who endures.
It was a posture before nature.
It was also a posture before an age.
11. And He Left It There
He said it once, and never again.
He left no grievance behind, and named no one.
He blamed nobody.
He did not fight.
He could have spoken.
He could have said that it was unjust.
He did not.
Instead, he painted.
He was a painter of the unpainted space.
He knew how to leave a place unfilled.
There is one such place in his life as well.
It is not empty.
It is filled with one sentence, and fifty years of painting.
12. Seventeen Years
To call this a forgotten period is not accurate.
| Year | |
|---|---|
| 1959 | Fifth solo exhibition, sponsored by Mapo High School. Central Public Information Hall |
| 1960 | Head of the art department, Sorabol Art College |
| 1960s | Enters the Biwon, the Secret Garden of Changdeokgung, daily, and paints it |
| 1961 | 47th Kōfūkai Exhibition — Summer Landscape |
| 1962 | 48th Kōfūkai Exhibition — Outskirts of Seoul. Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum |
| 1963 | International Free Artists Exhibition, by invitation |
| 1967 | Malaysia International Exhibition, by invitation |
| 1969 | Exhibition of Active Korean Artists |
| 1969 | Travels to Japan as Korean delegate to the International Society for Education through Art |
| April 1971 | 57th Kōfūkai Exhibition — Aeryeonjeong Pavilion, F100. Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum |
| 1971 | Solo exhibition in Japan — eighteen Biwon paintings |
| 22 Dec 1974 | Opens the Painter's House in Miari. Founds the Oriental Art Association |
He went on painting, and he went on going out.
13. The Biwon
What he painted through the 1960s was the Biwon (祕苑) — the Secret Garden behind Changdeokgung Palace. A place long closed.
The brush grew finer. The observation turned microscopic.
He painted a single roof tile, a single leaf.
The more minute it grew, the quieter the picture became.
Aeryeonjeong. Eosumun. The old trees. Bandoji. Buyongjeong.
A garden with no people in it.
For more than ten years he painted nothing else.
In 1971 he carried that garden to Tokyo and held a solo exhibition there. Eighteen works, most of them the Biwon.
14. 1974 — A Declaration
A year before he went to Jeju, he founded the Oriental Art Association and became its head.
At the Painter's House in Miari. 22 December.
Its principle ran:
A group of painters seeking, through the medium of Western oil painting, to realise a distinctly East Asian manner of our own.
The materials of the West; the manner of the East.
And the following year, he went to Jeju.
15. And 1975
The 《Porter》 of 1958 walks out again.
The bent back. The body under its load.
A man standing before the wind.
What was not spoken did not disappear.
It became colour, and became line.
Statements of fact are based on original documents and the contemporary press. No conjecture is presented as fact.
[1] The date and the route
Forty-seven years later he still had the date exactly.
— Oral History of Modern and Contemporary Korean Art, 2005: Byun Shi-Ji, Session 2, "The Return"
[2] On mukansa
At the Kōfūkai he was a member and a juror. Members are not juried; their submissions are recorded as kaiin shuppin (會員出品), "shown as a member."
The Nitten was an open competition: non-members had to pass its jury. Exemption from that jury was called mukansa (無鑑査); after the war the same standing was termed ishoku shuppin (依囑出品), "submission by invitation."
The 1958 Hwashin pamphlet joins the two terms in a single line — "having submitted to the Japanese national exhibition by invitation (the pre-war status of mukansa)…" — the painter's own gloss on the change of name.
The list of sixty works keeps the distinction exactly: 光風會 會員出品 (Kōfūkai, as member) and 日展 依囑出品 (Nitten, by invitation).
[3] On the university appointment
He took up the post on his return, 15 November 1957, and left in early June 1958 — six and a half months. This agrees with the published chronology, which records that he resigned "after six months."
No document of the appointment or the resignation survives. This archive marks the fact as secondary evidence.
Sources
- - Mapo High School identity certificate (1 September 1958) · Kōfūkai membership certificate (2 November 1957) — artist's studio
- - Terauchi Manjirō, A Farewell to Byun (1957) — artist's studio
- - Exhibition pamphlet, Retrospective of Oil Paintings by Ushiro Byun Shi-Ji (1958) — full checklist of sixty works
- - Solo exhibition pamphlet, Japan (1971) — biography and checklist
- - Oral History of Modern and Contemporary Korean Art, 2005: Byun Shi-Ji — Arts Council Korea · Korea Institute for the Arts. Narrator: Byun Shi-Ji; interviewer: Lee In-beom; 307 pp. Session 4 (28 December 2004), Giving form to the storm
On the quotations — passages from the oral history are excerpts, rendered as spoken. Copyright rests with Arts Council Korea; they are quoted here for research and criticism.
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