Artwork text
The wind erases the field.
It erases the road,
erases the footprints,
erases even the way back.
A single horse
stands with its head bowed low.
Where is it to go?
Before it,
a crow alights.
The bird that knows the way.
The bird that once passed
between this world and the next.
Yet it does not point the way.
It only sits
facing the horse.
By not answering,
it stays with it.
To stand in place,
not driven away by the wind.
That desolate stillness
is the only dignity
possible in this field.
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