Artwork text
The horizon wavers.
The world's bearings waver.
The land,
the house,
the boat too
ripple as if they had lost their places.
In the midst of it,
a lone figure, leaning on a staff,
stands.
It is not that the figure does not waver.
Only that, even in the wavering,
it does not forget
where to look.
It does not chase
the departing boat.
What it looks toward
is beyond where the boat is bound,
an empty horizon
that nothing has yet reached.
The horizon is not an end.
It is where the visible world
and the world yet to come
touch each other.
To exist
is not to stand upon fixed ground.
Even when the bearings waver,
it is to set one's gaze
not toward what has passed,
but toward what is coming.
That
is how a person stands
within a wavering world.
Key context
Byun Shi-Ji was a Korean modern and contemporary painter who treated Jeju’s Fūdo not as scenery but as a condition of existence. Through solitude, waiting, wind and the colour of dried grass, his art formed a glocal modernism rooted in Korea and open to the world.