Artwork text
The sun rises. The husband goes to the field, and the wife goes to the sea. The
husband drives the ox and plows the field. Sweat soaks his back. The wife enters the
water. She gathers sea snails and picks abalone. One on the land, one in the sea.
Under the same sky, with the same heart, they shoulder the day. With that sweat, a
child grew. With the sweat the parents drew up day by day from the land and the
sea.
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.