Artwork text
A single tree
draws its body upward
toward the sky.
It is not a tree that grew straight.
It is a tree that endured the wind for a long time,
bent, and bent again.
From the end of that bent body,
two birds rise into the air.
So as not to sink into the field,
so as not to be buried by the wind,
they cry in the highest pitch.
I am alive, I am here,
so that the sound
may reach the end of the sky.
is a sound that pushes its own being upward
so that, in the end,
it will not disappear.
Though the body is fixed in the earth,
remaining in the place of exile,
the sound can leave the body
and rise to where
the empty sun is.
That beating of wings
is not separate from the tree.
It is the one note
the bent body has held all its life,
at last gaining wings.
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.