Artwork text
On the stone wall
the crows are gathered.
The stone mound before them, too,
if you look quietly,
seems like people crouching together.
Shoulder to shoulder,
heads bowed,
gathered into a single mass.
Far out at sea,
a small boat is afloat.
The birds can fly,
but the people turned to stone
cannot leave their place.
Did they wait so long
that people became stone?
Waiting for the one who left,
did those who remained lean on one another
and harden into a single mound?
The boat is far away,
and the waiting remains on land.
The stone mound is not dead stone,
but the form of people who,
waiting for the one who does not return,
lost their words.
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.