Artwork text
The whole surface
is a sea the color of dry grass.
Far to the left,
a single small boat.
At the tip of the black cape on the right,
a figure stands.
The boat is small, and the figure is small.
Between them
the sea lies without end.
But the sea
is not water that divides the two.
The heart that watches the one who has left
and the heart that does not forget where to return
meet upon that wide water.
is a sea that draws them apart,
yet in the end lets them look toward one another.
Though they cannot reach each other, to remain within the same sea —
that is how this sea holds them together.
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.