South Korean history

The Disappeared Murals: A Forensic Post-Mortem of South Korea’s Banned 1980s Art

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A massive political mural being burned in a South Korean university courtyard by riot police, late 1980s aesthetic.

There is a particular kind of dread that has no Western analogue. It is not the dread of the unknown, which Western horror has catalogued exhaustively. It is the dread of the deliberately obliterated: the object that existed, that was witnessed, that was recorded in the nervous systems of thousands of people, and that was … Read more

The Jeon Tae-il Case: How South Korea’s Most Dangerous Children’s Book Vanished

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A forensic close-up of a library shelf where one book is being eerily replaced by another, symbolizing the erasure of Jeon Tae-il's biography.

There is a specific category of wrongness that operates below the threshold of public scandal. It does not announce itself. It does not leave a crater. It leaves, instead, a clean shelf. A tidy number in a series. A new cover where an old one stood. The book you are looking for is gone, and … Read more