Artwork text
Beside the wide sea, in one corner, an old man walks, leaning on a staff. The
hill before him is not straight. It rises, falls low, and stretches far again. The
path a person has walked could not go straight either. At times turning back,
at times lowering the body, it has come this far. On that bent line lies the
time of a life. Life, perhaps, is not the search for a straight road, but the
walking of a bent road all the way to the end.
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.