Artwork text
This shore is empty,
but it is not desolate.
A bird flies,
and the branch on the left
stretches long toward the boat,
as if waving.
The sea, too, sees it off with small ripples.
No person is visible.
Yet everything on the shore
moves its body
toward the departing boat.
heard the rhythm of living things.
And so this half-day
is not a lonely half-day,
but a lively one.
Solitude
is not a place where life has stopped.
It is the place where the small movements of the world
are heard more clearly.
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.