The Longest Grave Coiling Around the Mountain

Hur Hojeong

2025

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This exhibition begins with the fact that the unnamed “bones and souls” form the mountains and streams of the Korean peninsula.

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Golryeonggol refers to a valley near a low mountain in the southeastern part of Daejeon, once called Gonryongsan. It came to be known as “Golryeonggol” after stories of bones (gol, 骨) and souls (ryeong, 靈) buried in the foothills of Gonnyongsan began to circulate.¹

It was the day they broke ground to build a church. The tip of the shovel struck something—a bone, then a heap of bones. People scattered in shock. They moved the bones elsewhere, brought trash to cover the site, and tried various means to proceed, but the construction was eventually

halted.²

Did the stories buried beneath the earth finally come to light in this way?

It is said that in 1950, not long after the events occurred, blood seeping from the valley flowed down into the lower village. The stench at the mouth of the valley was so strong that people  could not approach. Aside from stray dogs or wandering vagrants searching for something to eat, no one set foot on that land again. Villagers recalled that the long, stick-like object carried in a dog’s mouth was, in fact, a human bone.How much time has passed since then? For some, the memory remained vivid enough to evoke guilt; for others, it faded away.

In 2007, an excavation team finally reached the site and began collecting the fragments buried beneath the upturned soil. Not everything they found was clearly identifiable as “bones.” Even distinguishing what should be considered bone was difficult.One person’s femur was found attached to another’s shattered skull, and so on. During the process of separating the one from the other, fragments would struck against each other and crumbled into powder. These pieces, this powder, were merely “objects” lying in the earth, yet at the same time regarded as bearing “personhood.” The materiality of bone is caught in a dual bind: it is both an object left to lie where it fell, and someone who must be held on to.

On days when rain poured down, fragments buried deep in the ground would surface and wash all the way down to the village. Until the rain stopped and the excavation team could return, villagers collected the fragments carried by the water and placed them under a wooden platform so the researchers could easily recover them. Beneath the platform, the fragments piled up, unorganized.

Even now, what lies beneath the earth remains without a name. Some bones will be excavated, collected, and eventually identified through DNA analysis as long-lost family members—Kim ___, Im ___, Oh ___… Yet in the process, the many bones lying beside those newly “named” remains will stay where they are, indistinguishable from stones and soil. In decades to come, they will sprout grass, flowers, and fruit.

When Jeong Kyeongbin arrived at Golryeonggol, there was little to see beyond dense vegetation. Grasses stretched across the field, punctuated by clusters of false daisies (Asteraceae with white petals and yellow stamens).

At the base of the indifferent mountain stood a sign explaining the site’s appearance at the time of excavation. A photograph depicted the bare earth, exposing the mass grave. Even with the sign’sguidance, it was barely possible to imagine the disordered scene,requiring an “imagination” far more difficult than “memory.”

How had they come here? From distant Jeju Island, from nearby Daejeon Prison—people were dragged to the site. Were their eyes blindfolded? Were their hands tied? Or, in broad daylight with everything plainly visible, did they follow those before them, accepting their fate? In the midst of war, they faced the gun barrels of the South Korean army and police.³Somewhere between scream and silence, between grief and resignation.

Jeong wanders through that space without anchors, imagining endlessly, and painting.Yet to imagine, to paint, often feels powerless. Visiting Golryeonggol every month, the artist watched the land transform with each season, stood in places where flowers bloomed in unusual abundance, and listened to stories at memorial rites. She even asked a distant relative who had lived in Daejeon all her life about Golryeonggol—and learned she had never known of its existence. How does one reveal what is barely visible, barely audible?

Jeong turns not to the event itself, but to the present ground—what remains within our reach today. She paints the material left behind, the matter that holds traces of the event at a molecular level. In this way, her works resemble both excavated and unexcavated bones—impersonal fragments yet to be named. Her paintings reveal the materiality of “gol-ryeong,” situated between object and person.

At the center of the exhibition stands a platform roughly the size of a human body. Black and low, it lies like a coffin. On it rests a book containing the drawings and writings the artist made while traveling to and from the massacre site. The large paintings that fill the walls appear as abstract fields built from tremulous brushstrokes—applied lightly and repeatedly by an artist living with fibromyalgia. She allows the pigments to flow downward across the surface, then layers lines of varying thickness atop them, treating the surface as though it were a kind of skin.

Two works titled Red Ground (2025), installed on the innermost wall, were made by sweeping her arms in wide arcs, drawing long lines, and layering new ones atop them. In the process of extending the lines into coiling forms, the artist exhausts her body and simultaneously recalls a certain grave—a mound formed by bodies upon bodies becoming a mountain.

Color plays a central role in these predominantly monochromatic works. In Red Ground, the artist uses a pigment called Caput Mortuum (“dead head”), a deep purplish-brown hue said to have originated from ashes left in 17th-century alchemical processes. Some accounts even suggest it was once made from crushed mummies. The black pigment prominent in Red Ground_Coiling(2025) is Peach Black, produced by burning peach pits. In tracing the histories of pigments, Jeong discovered that the older the colors, the more likely they originated from something burned. A painting built from pigments born of fire becomes flesh turned into earth, a grave, a landscape rising atop a grave.

Similarly, in the Ground or Body (2025) series, the bold red strokes slicing across the canvas evoke flesh lying beneath the ground we walk on. The color filling the pictorial field resembles a surface of pressed flesh, a fissured wound, a pit of unknowable depth, or a place where something rested for a long time.

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On a literal level, the remains at massacre sites exist only in narrow traces. Bodies have lost their volume, reduced to bones, and are gradually dissolving into the molecules of the soil. It is not easy to imagine a single person—let alone “the people”—from what remains. In this context, Jeong chooses to focus closely on the ground where the remains once lay, depicting the unseen peopleas landscape, still life, or abstraction. This process parallels the act of gathering the “remaining bones,” fragments that barely exist at all.

Perhaps this is why the small drawing titled The People (2025)—a faint form suggesting two or more bodies leaning together—earned its name. Since 2023, Jeong has visited civilian massacre sites across Korea, collecting stories and images. She continues to grapple with the challenge facing representation and representational images: revealing the buried flesh, opening the earth, exposing what cannot be seen or heard.

The Longest Grave Coiling Around the Mountain takes on this nearly impossible task.

1. Goryeonggol is the name given to the area where, immediately after the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, at least 1,800 and up to approximately 7,000 civilians were massacred by military and police forces. Administratively, it is located in Sannae-dong, Dong-gu, Daejeon Metropolitan City. As of 2024, 1,472 sets of remains have been excavated and recovered from this site. The combined length of the eight pits where remains were found reaches approximately 1 kilometer, earning it the nickname “the world’s longest grave.” The exhibition title draws inspiration from this. For related content, see below. Eom Seon-yeong, “Bones Piled Like Mountains… Will Sunshine Ever Reach This Valley of Grief? – The Sannae Golryeonggol Incident,” The Korea University Newspaper (2023-04-03) https://www.kunews.ac.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=40796 ; Lim A-yeon, “‘Golleunggol’ Peace Park Breaks Ground After 10 Years… Why Bereaved Families Are Protesting,” OhmyNews (July 28, 2025) https://www.ohmynews.com/NWS_Web/View/at_pg.aspx?CNTN_CD=A0003152174 .

2. The following content is a reconstruction of the narrative presented in the following paper. Kim Tae-in, “The Materiality of Remains and the Politics of Memory: A Case Study of the Exhumation of Remains at the Daejeon Golryeonggol Civilian Massacre Site during the Korean War,” Korean Cultural Anthropology 57-3 (2024): 93-132.

3. The issue of genocide perpetrated by the people against those deemed their ‘own kind’ starkly reveals the irrational situation where the ‘right to kill’ is specifically monopolized. Regarding the shock experienced by citizens confronting the killing of civilians by the national army, one can refer to research on the May 18th Democratization Movement. Professor Choi Jeong-gi of the Department of Sociology at Chonnam National University mentions his experience meeting and researching comfort women, bereaved families of massacre victims during the Korean War, and Vietnam War veterans in the video (from Kader Attia’s “Moving Borders,” 2018). (…) He states that the layers of trauma experienced by the victims of Gwangju on May 18th and their bereaved families are rooted in the following shock: Unlike war, where an enemy force is assumed and one’s death is somewhat foreseeable, the citizens of Gwangju could not have anticipated any of this. (…) “How could the national army do this to us?” “How could a democratic nation do this to its people?” Quoted from my subsequent writing. 「Gwangju, Things Still Unseen」,『CRITIC-Al』 (2018-10-01).