Artwork text
Across the whole image,
dry light ripples.
Like waves,
like a field,
it is all a yellowed texture.
At the center,
a horse and a person,
entwined in one black mass,
hold on to each other.
Above them hangs a dry sun.
Under this light,
what has waited too long
loses its movement.
The person and the horse,
leaning against each other, harden.
Unable to leave,
unable to let go,
they become, at last, a single stone.
Even as stone,
it is the form of a heart
that could not lay down its waiting.
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.
painterJejuartsolitudeFūdo (milieu and climate)waitingmodernismglocalismKorean painter