Artwork text
The same Ieodo theme — the night of the storm.
Blackness swallowed the image.
With neither sky nor earth,
the whole world whirls.
The tree shudders from its roots,
and the horse has lowered its head.
For there is no boat left
to watch for.
In the middle of that blackness,
a single house
crouches low and endures.
This is
the darkest Ieodo.
Before the empty boat returns,
before the crow cries,
it is the night
when the storm, in full force,
is carrying that man away.
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.