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This exhibition begins with a ‘fact’: the mountains and fields of the peninsula are built upon the unnamed “bones and souls” buried beneath them.
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Golryeonggol refers to a valley near Gonlyongsan, a low mountain in southeast Daejeon. After people began hearing stories about the bones (gol, 骨) and spirits (ryeong, 靈) buried along the slopes of Gonlyongsan, the area came to be called Golryeonggol. ¹
It happened on the day the ground was broken to build a church. Something struck the tip of the shovel. A bone. Heaps of bones. Shocked, people stepped back. They tried moving the bones elsewhere, covering the ground with trash and other things, but in the end the construction was stopped. ²
Did the stories buried beneath the earth finally come to light?
In 1950, not long after the incident, blood is said to have flowed down from the valley into the village below. A strong smell hung in the air, so heavy that people could not go near. Except for vagrants or wild dogs searching for food, no one entered the valley again. People in the village recall that the long object in a dog’s mouth was a human bone. Time passed. Enough for some to carry vivid memories and guilt, while for others those memories faded.
In 2007, an excavation team finally reached the site and began gathering the fragments buried in the ground. Not everything they found was recognisable as bone. Even telling one piece from another was difficult. A certain person’s thigh bone might be stuck to someone else’s crushed skull. While trying to separate them, pieces would grind against each other and turn to powder.
These fragments and this powder are objects lying in the earth, yet at the same time regarded as traces of a person. The material nature of the bone sits in a double bind; something that has fallen to the ground like an object, and someone who must be held onto.
On days where rain poured down, fragments long buried would rise to the surface and wash into the village. Until the rain stopped and the excavation team returned, villagers gathered the pieces that drifted down from the valley and placed them under a wooden platform so the team could find them easily. Unsorted fragments piled up beneath it.
Still, what lies under the ground has no name. Some bones will be recovered, examined and identified through DNA testing, eventually returning to families named Kim, Im, Oh, and others. But during that process, many of the bones lying near those identified remains will stay where they are, as piles of stones and soil. Over the decades, grass, flowers and fruit will grow above them.
***When Jeong Kyeongbin arrived in Golryeonggol, all that could be seen were tall grasses. The place was filled with weeds and clusters of fleabane with white petals and yellow centers. At the foot of the quiet mountain stood a signboard showing photos of the excavation; bare earth with massed bones exposed. With the help of that signboard, one tries to imagine the scattered scene that once existed there. It takes an effort of imagination, harder than recalling a memory.
How did those people end up there? Some were brought from as far as Jeju, others from the nearby Daejeon Prison. Were their eyes covered? Were their hands tied? Or, in broad daylight with everything in clear view, did they follow the ones taken before them, accepting their fate to some degree? In the midst of war, they faced the guns of soldiers and police.³ Between screams and silence. Between grief and resignation. Jeong Kyeongbin wanders through that in-between space, imagining what cannot be known, and paints.
Yet the act of imagining and painting often feels powerless. Visiting Golryeonggol every month, the artist looked closely at the land as it changed with the seasons and stood in places where flowers bloomed in unusual abundance. She attended memorial rites and listened to stories. She asked a distant relative who had lived in Daejeon all their life about Golryeonggol, only to hear that they had never heard of it. How can something barely visible, barely audible, be revealed at all?
Jeong Kyeongbin turns not to the event itself but to what came after. To the land we can stand on today. She paints the material traces left in the soil, fragments that hold the event at a molecular level. For this reason, her works resemble bones that were uncovered or never found, impersonal pieces that have yet to receive a name. Her paintings reveal the material presence of “Golryeong”, suspended between object and person.
***At the centre of the exhibition stands a low, black wooden platform, roughly the size of a human body lying down. It sits like a coffin. On top of it rests a book, 『Coiling』, (2025), a collection of the artist’s writings and drawings made during repeated visits to the massacre site.
The large paintings on the walls are abstract surfaces built from loose, trembling brushstrokes. Because the artist lives with fibromyalgia, each stroke wavers, filling the canvas with thin, uneven lines. The ground is prepared by letting mixed pigment flow and settle, and on top of this, layers of lines are added in varying thicknesses. The process reveals a surface the artist approaches almost like skin, emphasizing its material presence.
The two works titled ⟪Red Ground⟫ (2025), installed on the innermost wall of the gallery, were made by swinging the arm in wide motions, drawing lines with the whole body, and then layering new lines over the traces of those gestures. As she stretches each line long and coils it again and again, the artist exhausts her own body while recalling a grave formed from the bodies of many others, piled until they became a mountain.
Colour plays an important role in these mostly monochromatic paintings. In ⟪Red Ground_Red Mountain⟫, the artist uses a pigment known as “Caput Mortuum”, meaning “dead head”. This deep shade of purple-brown is said to have originated in the 17th century from the residue left after alchemical burning. Some describe it as a colour made from the ashes of a “mummy”. The pronounced black in ⟪Red Ground_Coiling⟫ comes from “peach black”, a pigment made by burning peach pits. The artist often looks into the histories and names of colours she uses, discovering that many old pigments were created by burning something. A painting built up from pigments born of fire becomes, in this way, a kind of material landscape; a flesh turned to earth, a grave, and the terrain rising above it.
Likewise, in the ⟪Ground or Body⟫(2025) series, the broad red strokes running across the canvas evoke flesh beneath the ground we stand on. The colour filling the surface can look like the meeting edges of skin, the split of a wound, a pit with no measurable depth, or a place where something has settled for a long time.
*On a physical level, the remains at the massacre site exist only in narrow traces. The bodies have lost their thickness, turned to be bone, and are dissolving into the soil at a molecular level. Imagining a person, or people from such remnants, is not easy. Faced with this, Jeong Kyeongbin chooses to look closely at the land where the remains once lay, to stand there and paint the unseen people as landscape, still life, and abstraction. This process is not far from gathering what little is left; those “remaining bones” that exist only barely, almost not at all.
A small drawing; about the size of a palm, showing a faint shape that seems to hold more than one person, has been given the title ⟪The People⟫(2025), perhaps for this reason. Since 2023, Jeong Kyeongbin has been travelling to sites of civilian massacres across the country, gathering stories and images. She continues to grapple with the difficulty of representation and of images that try to depict what cannot easily be shown.
To reveal buried flesh, to open the ground and bring out what cannot be seen or heard – The Longest Grave Coiling Around the Mountain takes on this task, one that feels almost impossible.
Text by Hur Hojeong
Translated by Gallery Chosun
¹ Golryeonggol’ is the name of an area in Sannae-dong, Dong-gu, Daejoen, where, shortly after the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, at least 1,800 and up to more than 7,000 civilians were killed by the military and police. As of 2024, 1,472 sets of remains have been recovered from the site. The combined length of the eight pits where the remains were found is about one kilometre, which is why the place is sometimes called “the longest grave in the world”. The exhibition is drawn from this fact. For more information, see: 엄선영, 「뼈가 산처럼 쌓여… 한 맺힌 골짜기에도 볕 들까 – 대전 산내 골령골 사건」, 『고대신문』(2023-04-03) https://www.kunews.ac.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=40796 ; 임아연, 「‘골령골’ 평화공원 10년만에 첫 삽 뜨는데… 유족들 반발하는 까닭」, 『오마이뉴스』(2025-07-28) https://www.ohmynews.com/NWS_Web/View/at_pg.aspx?CNTN_CD=A0003152174 .
² The following content is a reconstruction of the discussion in: 김태인, 「유해의 물질성과 기억의 정치: 한국전쟁기 대전 골령골 민간인학살지 유해발굴 사례 연구」, 『한국문화인류학』 57-3 (2024): 93-132.³The issue of civilians being killed by people they might consider “their own” exposes in extreme form the irrational situation in which someone assumes the “right to kill”. For understanding the shock experienced by citizens facing killings by the national army, research on the May 18 Gwangju uprising can be referenced: “전남대 사회학과 교수 최정기 씨는 영상(카데르 아티아Kader Attia, 〈이동하는 경계들〉(2018) 중)에서 위안부 여성, 6.25 전쟁 당시 학살 피해 유족, 베트남 전 참전자들을 만나고 연구한 자신의 경험을 언급한다. (…) 그러면서 그는 5.18 광주의 희생자와 그 유족들이 겪은 트라우마의 층위가 다음과 같은 충격에 뿌리 박혀 있다고 말한다. 전쟁에서는 적군이 상정되고 나의 죽음이 어느 정도 예견되는 것과 달리, 광주 시민들은 어느 것도 예상할 수 없었다는 것이다. (…) “어떻게 국군이 우리에게 이럴 수 있지?”, “어떻게 민주주의 국가가 인민에게 이럴 수 있지?”” 내가 쓴 다음의 글에서 인용. 「광주, 여전히 보[이]지 않는 것들」, 『크리틱-칼』(2018-10-01).
The Longest Grave Coiling Around the Mountain : Jeong Kyeongbin
Current exhibition