Artwork text
A single tree
rises at a slant
and in the end stretches its body upward.
It has been bent by the wind, and at the same time
it is a gesture reaching toward the sky.
The things on the ground
are all low.
The person, the horse, the house,
enduring the wind,
lower themselves.
Yet the tree alone,
even as it bends low,
turns in the end toward what is above.
That, perhaps,
is the posture of a life
that does not forget the sky,
even within the wind.
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.