Series from the Hwasil, a Room of Flowers and Magic
By Julia Wargo, a second year ETA in Gumi, Gyeongsangbuk-do
I
Darker, lighter, darker.
These are the only words I hear for hours at a time, and I repeat them over and over again to myself.
There’s something deeply meditative about that repetition, and about ink wash painting. Ink: solid midnight, ground out of a stick and applied to white hanji paper. Washing: the process of purification.
Together, painting purifies me from beginning to end. When I arrive in the studio, I grind the inkstick until my arm is sore, and I am regretting adding too much water to the mixture. Concentrating on making the most concentrated black, one that doesn’t lighten if I leave it out to dry.
Then, when the ink is ready, a pool of darkness waiting to be dipped into, my teacher picks up a brush and paints an example. There are no words in this place but those he repeats: darker here and lighter there. Understand?
There are no definites, only a maybe. It is turned by necessity into a hesitant, “Yes.”
I try to imitate the painting, and in the end when I am done and holding the brush under the faucet, seeing streaks in the water, that unsaid maybe echoes in my mind.
II
Sometimes I catch myself thinking about more uncertainties. About how 화 (hwa) can mean painting (畵) and sometimes fire (火) and sometimes flower (花).
Hwasil literally translates to painting studio, but sometimes I think of this place as a flower studio. There are papers with flowers on them plastered on the walls and on the floor, where I have to step gingerly to avoid them. The only free space is the ceiling, and if flower paintings were to appear there too, I wouldn’t be overly surprised.
On rare occasions, other paintings materialize. Sometimes there are neat rows of Chinese characters, or a tiger or dragon. But for the most part, I am learning more words for flowers than I ever knew before in English.
The first four types of painting I’ve learned are orchids, bamboo, chrysanthemums and plum blossoms. After you’ve learned them once, you should repeat them over and over, perfecting and adding more strokes, more additions, improving. It’s a progression perfected over centuries, and sometimes I can feel those years echoing deeply when I am attempting to paint. Legacies I can’t live up to, that don’t quite belong to me, but that require respect.
I am drawn to other subjects too. The lotus, stretching high out of the pond. The trumpet vine, orange and reaching low, overhanging a wall. Persimmons, plump and ripe. Goldfish in the pond, with slight ripples around them fashioned from the barest hint of ink and water. The sheer variety is overwhelming. To focus on the strength of boulders? Or the delicacy of a vase?
When I leave the room, flowers are blooming in my mind and fish swimming through the air around me. The world comes alive and electric to the touch. I carry the painting and the fire and the flower inside me.
III
Nothing can convince me that this place isn’t some sort of liminal space where anything can happen. It’s a place where there are multitudes of blossoms and multitudes of stories.
Many of them spring straight from my teacher’s mind, and his sense of humor sometimes differs from my own.
One day, I am painting a bird, and my teacher gestures for me to hold out my hand. When I look inside my palm, there is a detached bird’s leg. With feathers still attached. A mild sense of horror surfaces, which I try to suppress. He’s looking for a reaction and the chance to laugh at my squeamishness. Instead, I just say, “cool,” and chuckle.
Is it just a model for drawing a bird? Or something else? The possibilities are endless.
The next week, it’s alcohol made from bee larvae on offer, his amused smile just daring me to try it. I can’t quite bring myself to, the murky brown color reminding me a bit too much of river water.
Next, his humor lands on frogs as its object of interest.
The first image he paints is of two frogs, dancing. It’s left to me to question why.
The next image he draws is the same, but a snake appears. I expect danger, not what follows. The snake pours a cup of alcohol for the frogs. And the frogs happily drink themselves into a daze under the gaze of the full moon, painted in a shade between blue and purple and clear water.
I ask: why? Why are there frogs, why is there a snake, why is there alcohol, and how did you conjure this from nothing, from a blank page?
I don’t get an answer, just a grin and yet another story to live on in my mind.
IV
There are frequent breaks when my teacher vanishes for indeterminate periods of time to smoke, and the studio suddenly feels more like an average room. Four walls, a roof, air that is too hot in the summer and cold enough to see your own breath in the winter.
Sometimes the breaks take five minutes, sometimes I suspect he’s wandered off for a meal or a walk or to the mountain to look for wild ginseng. I am left looking at my brush and paper.
This time, when he comes back to the hwasil, he motions for me to follow. We’re on the third floor, and he goes up the stairs. What is beyond this room? What is left but rooftop? Does the magic extend beyond the boundaries of the door and windows?
It’s past sunset, and my eyes don’t adjust immediately. I stumble a bit over uneven floorboards. He points at the sky, towards the mountain, and I see a flashing light.
Amidst the disorientation, I feel my first burst of certainty in a long while. The magic in the hwasil was carried here to this rooftop and to me by the thread of my teacher’s path upstairs. To this place where there is only darkness punctuated by the even darker mountain and the light in the sky that is not a star.
He mentions the word, “alien.” And I am laughing inside and out. How did I come to be here in this particular place in time? On a roof with a view of the horizon, with this man on his smoke break trying to convince me that he’s seen a UFO, a speck of lightness in the dark?
I try to argue, but I don’t know the word for satellite, and so I surrender to the possibility that it is something stranger than I would ever admit to believing in over the mountain.
The truth isn’t as important as welcoming all of the possibilities, just as I’ve been welcomed into this space.
However I came to be here, I’m here.
V
Another teacher in the hwasil starts to play some Buddhist chants. The words namu amitabul repeat and repeat, winding their way deeper into my mind. The insistence of the moktak 1 sends a shiver down my spine. Repetition, rhythm, religion. Magic.
Which is just what we don’t understand, after all.
The longer I spend in the hwasil the more I wonder exactly how much I do and don’t understand. I know the word for camellia and magnolia and how to position the brush in order to draw a segment of bamboo. I know how to distinguish between different fish species. But I’ve exchanged all that for the knowledge of the unknown.
Some days I just cling onto my brush and the only things left in my mind are the words darker and lighter. And it’s okay. This is my only truth and only magic.