Artwork text
The sea lies low,
pale in the color of the soil.
Above the horizon,
a small boat returns.
To return
is not to go back to the time before leaving.
After passing through wind and waves,
it is to know, at last,
the meaning of the place one left.
The returning boat is not only a boat coming home.
It is a being touching itself once more.
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.