Artwork text
The blue sea
is the sea of young days.
But the sea that has long endured
fades into a yellowed color.
Dried by the sun,
worn by the wind,
holding even human sorrow,
the sea at last
becomes this color.
Having long received weeping,
it becomes, in the end, a dried color.
The sea sways,
the haenyeo curls her body.
The two are not apart.
The sea
is the haenyeo's tears.
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.