Artwork text
A letter is a way of sending the heart to someone who cannot be reached. The
person remains on land and writes, and the small boat carries that heart out to the
far sea. No reply will come. He knows this. Still, he writes. While he writes the letter,
he is still speaking to the one who left. He calls that name, recalls the days gone by,
and sets down the words he could not say. The one who left does not return. Yet for
as long as he keeps speaking, that person becomes, in his heart, someone seated
before him once more. And so he writes. So as not to lose, not yet, the time he
shared with that person.
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.