Artwork text
A sea the color of dry grass tilts, filling the whole surface.
Far to the left, a single skiff trembles like a dot.
But it is not only the boat that trembles.
The black waves tremble, the thatched house on the hill trembles,
and the hearts of the horse and the person tremble within the same wind.
The boat is on the sea, the person and the horse are on land.
They are in different places, yet within the same unease.
The person cannot hold the boat,
and the horse cannot stop that trembling.
The thatched house merely lowers itself,
the horse stands beside the person,
and the person, in the end, gazes at the sea.
To endure is not to keep from trembling.
It is to bear, within one's own heart, the trembling of a being far away,
and in the end not to turn one's eyes away.
The wavering skiff is a small boat upon the sea,
and also a single life that wavers within a person.
The world is wide and the boat is small.
Yet because of that one small being,
everything on land quietly holds its breath.
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.