The Island as Universe

Before the Title Jeoldo

Among Byun Shi-Ji’s works is Jeoldo, dated 1981. Its title places a question before the eye looking at an island. Separated from what, and seen as separated from whose position? Rather than take the title as proof of complete disconnection, we can ask what serves as the point of reference for an eye that takes connectedness for granted.

From the mainland, an island lies across the water. For someone standing on the island, however, the ground beneath their feet is not elsewhere. It is here. What is distant is the other land across the water. When the centre shifts, the meaning of the same distance changes. To read an island as a universe begins with acknowledging that the person standing within it also has a centre from which a world is encountered.

There is no need to turn the island, in consequence, into a complete world lacking nothing. A small place still has needs and things to exchange with other places. Seeing an island solely as deprivation and seeing it solely as self-sufficiency may seem opposite, yet both can erase its particular relations. The painting calls to be looked at again between those two conclusions.

The Edge of the Picture Is Not the Edge of the World

The form of an island has a perimeter. The line where water and land meet lets us recognise it as a distinct mass. But that line is not a sealed wall. The water that surrounds it can also lead towards other places. The island’s boundary shows a separation and, at the same time, a meeting between different things.

The edge of the painting matters too. The absence of a boat from a picture does not mean the sea was never a route. Another island does not cease to exist because it is not painted. The artist selects a scene. The stillness of that scene and the disconnection of an actual place are not the same fact. Erasing the world left outside the picture mistakes pictorial restraint for the poverty of a place.

Where few forms meet an expanse of space in Byun’s paintings, there is room to imagine connections not shown. The distance between house and shore, or between nearby land and a remote horizon, does not immediately supply a single story. It asks, instead, what sustains this place. The small world within the painting has boundaries of its own while leaving questions about the world beyond them.

Inside and Outside a Small House

A small house becomes an important form when the island is read as a question of habitation. Its low roof suggests an interior in which a person can place their body. But the existence of an inside is not a guarantee of complete safety. As the surrounding space widens, the house’s presence becomes more distinct and its smallness more apparent. Shelter and exposure can be felt within the same form.

Who is inside that house can be stated only to the extent that the picture tells us. A house without a depicted occupant need not be furnished with an old man. Nor does the absence of a visible person establish that it has been abandoned. Thinking of an interior through the relations between door, wall and roof differs from deciding the life that takes place within it.

This openness does not make the house an empty sign. It keeps alive our sensitivity to a place where someone might stay. Without explaining an entire life, the house invites thought about the minimum place a life requires. Its smallness within a broad landscape can sharpen the difference between inside and outside. A single door establishes a distance between body and world.

How Far Can the Metaphor of the Monad Go?

In Leibniz’s Monadology, a monad is a simple substance without parts. The account of its having no windows is not a description of a geographical place without routes for material passage. An island composed of land, houses and people cannot therefore be the same kind of entity as a monad. The small world of a painting and the simple substance of a philosophy belong to different levels of inquiry.

The more productive part of the comparison concerns how a world appears differently from a particular position. Leibniz gives the example of one city appearing different when viewed from different sides. Brought into a reading of painting, this suggests how a small place can offer a perspective on a wider world. Smallness need not mean possessing less of the world; it can mean encountering the world differently from that position.

At this level, the comparison need not turn the island into evidence of complete self-sufficiency. Byun’s painting opens not so much a place that possesses everything as a place where few forms are enough to raise questions about relations with the world. A philosophical name is used to assist that question. It cannot substitute for evidence that the painter knew and followed the philosophy.

Not Only Separated by the Sea, but Connected Through It

In Our Sea of Islands, Epeli Hau‘ofa changes the perspective that sees Pacific islands merely as small lands scattered across an ocean. In the Oceanian world he evokes, the sea is a space through which people have lived, travelled and extended their relations. The size of that world cannot be known simply by measuring its land.

This does not make Pacific history and Jeju’s history the same. What can be borrowed is a way of seeing boundaries: water lying between places does not by itself establish disconnection. The sea is a distance to cross and a possible route of passage. Seen this way, the space around an island may invite thought of other places rather than erase the island.

Bringing Byun’s paintings into an encounter with the world differs from constructing a myth of isolated genius. It means asking what questions a painting rooted in one place can offer to people in another: a body that leaves and returns, someone making a place to stay, beings of different scales within a shared space. Questions arising from a particular place called Jeju can meet other lives without losing that particularity.

The Person Who Returns Does Not Return Empty-Handed

Byun was born in Jeju, lived in Japan and Seoul, and later settled in Jeju. That sequence alone makes it difficult to read his island as a closed space without external relations. Ways of seeing and manual skills acquired while moving between places do not vanish upon reaching home. The body that returns already contains the time of several places.

Nor does this mean that every movement prepared the final return. No period of a life exists solely for the sake of a later outcome. Yet even when painting from a settled place, experiences of movement can become resources for new choices. The eye that paints the island was not formed on the island alone. That eye encounters the island’s light and wind anew.

Staying for a long time is therefore not the same as retreating from the world. Painting the same place again can alter composition and spacing. But repetition alone does not establish that every work is deeper than the one before it. Changes must be examined by placing works side by side. What matters is not merely the length of time spent there, but how that time is put to use within form.

Leaving a Small World Open

The island as universe need not name an ideal place where every need is met. It can name a question: how does one live in relation to other beings from a limited place? Smallness proves neither deprivation nor completeness. The presence of a small house tells us neither that its life is poor nor that it has enough. Between those conclusions, the particular conditions of habitation begin to appear.

Read in this way, solitude in Byun’s island need not remain a condition of enclosure. It can become a sensitivity to distance from other beings. The ground on which to place a body is narrow; the reach of the eye is long. Between them are daily life, movement and routes that may continue beyond the picture. The island becomes a universe not by confining the whole world within it, but by making wide relations felt from a small place.

The eye moves from the house to the shore, then beyond it to a distant line. At the edge of the picture, the sea does not end.