Not the Fee, the Opening
Word came from Jo Sudeok exactly one week later.
Jihun, could I see you today?
Vacation had just begun, so there was nothing in the way.
I'd rather come to you, but... there are a few complications on my side. I was hoping you could come to the lab.
"Of course. That's no trouble."
I'd known it would take some time. A week. More cautious than I'd expected, maybe. I picked up a book and left the house.
"Driver, Seoul National University, please."
In the moving car I read Moby-Dick. I'd been through it any number of times in my previous life, but in the original... Sleep came creeping. These past few days I'd put real work into my English, and the results had been decent enough. There was a keen pleasure in riding the rhythm that belonged only to the original, and on the strength of that I'd tried a book with some difficulty to it.
"......"
Moby-Dick, in every respect, felt like too much. I set the book aside and turned my eyes to the window. The morning commute had passed, and the road was pleasantly empty. Quiet. Just right. If only my life could be like a road at midday—no stalled stretches, just blown wide open.
If I want that. First I would have to earn twenty billion won. No way around it. And for that, Jo Sudeok would need to play a very large part. While thoughts of one kind and another tangled through my head, the campus of Seoul National came into view, by now nearly as familiar—was it?—as my old school.
I had no idea what answer Jo Sudeok had prepared. I'll know soon enough. The car came to a complete stop. The buckle clicked. I undid the belt and stood.
Inside the office of the chair of the Department of Western Painting, I faced Jo Sudeok across the table between the sofas.
"Can I get you something to drink?"
The slick smile he wore out of habit was gone. He said it almost plainly.
"I'm all right."
"This may run long. Wouldn't you be better off with some juice, at least?"
"No."
Jo Sudeok nodded. Whatever had changed in him over the week, the power-hungry light in his eyes had vanished without a trace.
"Your proposal, Jihun... I thought it over. But no matter how I turn it, it doesn't help. How am I supposed to decide anything when I don't even know what the work will be?"
Fair enough. But the world has things you simply cannot help.
"Once you hear what it is, you won't be able to refuse."
"Information is life, is that it?"
I nodded.
"Let me change the question. If this succeeds, what do you get out of it?"
"Money."
"Can you tell me, roughly, how much?"
Name a figure, and he would be able to infer the value of the painting well enough.
"I don't know either."
"Then what I stand to gain... you can tell me that much, can't you?"
"It's the same."
"Money, and no way to know how much?"
"No. Your return is fixed."
About a hundred million won, by the standards of the 2020s. The sum itself might not seem so large. For a single month of work! And there would be side benefits to count on, besides.
"If we take on something similar later, of course I'd come to you first."
"Meaning I could keep a relationship with Hyeon-gang."
"Yes."
"And this is all the information I'm permitted?"
I nodded again.
"The rest I hear only once the venture is underway, and even that... once I've heard the explanation, I can never take it back?"
"Exactly."
"Then all that's left is my decision."
I had waited a week to hear that answer. My guess was that he would not refuse. If he had meant to turn me down, courtesy alone would have brought him to the Hannam-dong house. And yet.
"I don't need my share of the fee."
Jo Sudeok came out with something I hadn't expected.
"You want something other than money?"
"Yes. In exchange, on the day the Hyeon-gang Art Museum opens, I want you to choose me as the artist of the inaugural exhibition."
What on earth was this, out of nowhere? The person who would direct the Hyeon-gang Art Museum was Song Suhee, and even then, in the early days, Chairman Park's influence would weigh heavily. An eleven-year-old had no place in it at all. And above everything else—a meaningful opening exhibition, and he wasn't even Kim Hwanki. How were they supposed to hang his pictures? I had plenty I could have said.
"......"
I didn't want to wound him, so I simply kept my mouth shut. My face, though, seemed to have answered for me already. Jo Sudeok hurried on, as if to explain.
"I thought you'd take it that way, so I prepared a work."
"Pardon?"
"You asked me then, didn't you. When I was going to paint something new. This is my answer."
This man. We were in the middle of talking business, and now he wanted to show me a painting? The absurdity lasted only a moment. Anyway, he won't take the money. That's what this is. Fine. I'd look, even if I was letting myself be fooled. What did I have to lose.
"Would you come over here?"
Jo Sudeok led me to a corner of the lab. A canvas lay there face-down, as if to keep the sun off it. He lifted it and set it carefully on the easel.
"A new piece. Look. The paint isn't even dry yet, is it?"
I had seen a great deal of Jo Sudeok's work. The exhibition rooms at Seoul National alone held a fair amount of it.
"I kept retouching it until dawn today. I hadn't held a brush in so long I'd lost the feel of it, but I forced it through to a finish anyway."
Forced it through.
"Well? It's worth a look, isn't it?"
"One moment."
"......?"
"Could you keep quiet, so I can actually look at the work?"
"Of course. Take your time. I'll step out."
The manner I'd seen from him until now had been sharp past the point of comfort. Put kindly, sensitive; put roughly, neurotic. A callow youth. Energy that had never been refined. That was what I had always felt, looking at Jo Sudeok's paintings. Today's picture was different.
Did he paint the cosmos? Stars risen thick across a deep black ground. What had the painter been thinking, laying in all those stars? The first thing that reached me was a kind of loneliness. He dreamed of stars, and yet in all that vast dark no space had been granted him, so before the canvas he could only carve, in silence, stars that belonged to other people. If this had been the Jo Sudeok of the past? He would have crammed the picture with a clenched vow—that he, too, would pour out light that bright. This painting held a heavy resignation instead. The anguish of a man who admits his limits and accepts them without fuss. The cruelty of a life, which only someone who has already done his utmost is permitted to meet. The savor of living that soaks into a true adult. Something like that.
I slowly turned my head toward Jo Sudeok.
"Chair."
"Yes, Jihun."
"This piece... you could hang it in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and it wouldn't be out of place at all."
"Oh—come now, that's going too far."
"I felt it clearly."
Jo Sudeok looked quietly into my eyes. How enormous the waves he had already come through must have been, for an eleven-year-old's praise to be something he could neither cry over nor laugh at. He opened his mouth calmly, without a ripple of feeling.
"Then... instead of a fee, may I hang my painting in the opening exhibition of the Hyeon-gang Art Museum?"
"That isn't mine to decide. I'm not even in a position to recommend you. Only—"
"......?"
"If several works at this level could be made ready, then Hyeon-gang itself would step forward and want to have you."
That was what the words said. The meaning was that it depended on Jo Sudeok. Nothing was guaranteed, and still—
"All right. Let's do it!"
"The business with you! My solo show! We'll just push all of it ahead."
Saving the money was fine by me. It isn't a sure thing, though. Ahem.
"Jihun, now that we've settled the contract, I'd like to give you this painting. As a gift."
"Pardon?"
"I made it from the inspiration you gave me. Wouldn't it mean more if you were the one who took it?"
But he had just said he was preparing a solo exhibition. This was the moment to secure every canvas he could. And he was going to give a work this good to me? As if he had read exactly that, Jo Sudeok went straight on.
"I can always paint another. What's the problem?"
"Then what about the business? If all you do is paint, when are you going to work?"
"Ah, you think I do the work myself?"
"......?"
"The actual work is what graduate students are for."
Huh?
"You're young, so you may not know, but a university is a place the doctoral students haul along, as a rule."
I knew. I had tasted graduate school myself.
"Last time, I said Boston, didn't I?"
I nodded.
"Turn just five of our kids loose there and they'll tear the place to pieces. You understand?"
"With only five?"
"Five is already too many. Three would be plenty."
"Th-then let's just stick with five."
"Budget's nice and fat, is it?"
No—however much I like money, a man born a chaebol skimping on what he pays graduate students... what kind of person would that make me?
"Professor, please hire plenty of people."
"Jihun, when you wring the last drop of efficiency out of the smallest possible staff, that thrill is really..."
Save that for when you're running your own project! Anything you do with me, you do it generously. Please!
Jo Sudeok had the sense to read the room.
"If the boss says that's how it is, then I follow."
He nodded, putting on the face of a man who had lost the argument.
The Hannam-dong house. After I finished talking business with Jo Sudeok, I came home at an easy pace, timed to Chairman Park Yonghak's return from work.
On the day the Hyeon-gang Art Museum opens, I want you to choose me as the artist of the inaugural exhibition. We were in the same boat now. I ought to at least try. Chairman Park isn't the sort who grants a thing just because you ask. The only way is to make it rise out of him on its own. The best of those ways was still to put him in front of the work. A meeting dressed up as chance.
A great engine bellowed.
"Please bring the painting out."
I asked the staff for help. A moment later the large sedan stopped, and Chairman Park stepped out.
"Grandfather, you're home?"
"What's this?"
"A painting."
The moment Chairman Park showed an interest, the staff who had been carrying the work stopped where they stood.
"Whose painting?"
"The painter Jo Sudeok..."
"That fellow who teaches at Seoul National's art college?"
"You knew who he was?"
"Wasn't much to look at. Dead weight, that one. What're you haulin' his pictures in for?"
"Um... it was better than I expected?"
"What?"
At that, Chairman Park took a step toward the painting, and the staff adjusted its height to meet his eyes.
"Hmph."
When a painting pleased Chairman Park, he would stand in front of it for thirty minutes at a time. He did so now. Hands clasped behind his back, he held his gaze on the work for more than ten minutes.
Professor Jo. At this point, I've done what I can! You admit that, right? Yes?
Several more minutes passed.
"Grandfather, it's cold. Why not look at it inside?"
"......"
"Grandfather."
"What'd you say?"
"You're dressed thin. I thought you might look at it indoors. I hear colds are going around."
"A cold. What's a cold."
Only then did Chairman Park turn his head from the painting. And, as if it were nothing more than a word in passing, he told the staff: