A South Korean city offers two ways to remember past traumas
A cemetery in Gwangju commemorates a massacre in 1980. Artists do it differently
ONCE YOU start to notice it, history is hard to overlook in Gwangju. All over town, traffic signs point to sites associated with “5·18”. The three digits stand for May 18th, the day in 1980 when the military dictatorship that then ruled South Korea began cracking down on pro-democracy protests in the south-western city. During the ten-day stand-off that followed, hundreds of civilians, many of them students, were killed by the security forces. Hundreds more were later prosecuted for taking part in the demonstrations.
This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “Ghost town”
From the May 22nd 2021 edition
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