JEONG KYEONGBIN

Since 2023, Jeong Kyeongbin has traveled across sites of civilian massacres in Korea, gathering stories and images. The exhibition title is inspired by the discovery of countless remains in a ravine in Daejeon. Known as ‘Gollyeonggol’, this area was one of the sites where thousands of civilians were executed in the early days of the Korean War. The combined length of the eight recently excavated pits extends to nearly one kilometer, earning it the name ‘the longest grave in the world’. The Longest Grave Coiling Around the Mountain seeks to recall the graves and deaths that lie beneath our feet not as mere folklore, but as historical reality. The works attempt to expose the flesh buried beneath the landscape’s surface, to part and sift through the earth, revealing what is unseen and unheard. Thus, the paintings landscapes that are at once earth and grave, flesh and ground undertake a kind of ‘recovery’. It is an attempt to gather the “remaining bones (遺骸),” those almost-vanished traces that survive only as fragments or dust. This gesture urges us, even before invoking the command to ‘remember’ the past, to first feel our way across the ground we inhabit now and learn to see it differently.