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Photographing the Night that Shook Seoul
Last December, South Korea found itself under martial law for the first time since the Gwangju Uprising. Yezoi Hwang took to the streets with her camera.
In the midday sunlight of upstate New York, I had no way of knowing how cold the night of December 3, 2024, was in South Korea, how dark and long it had been. With a fourteen-hour time difference, martial law in South Korea felt incomprehensible to me, like seeing the future of my homeland. But for the Seoul-based photographer Yezoi Hwang, it was the present. The words martial law, heard while having dinner, communicated something she couldn’t believe without seeing with her own eyes. So she picked up her camera and went out into the square.
Hwang often uses her camera in an effort to understand the incomprehensible. After making series that focused on her family—capturing, for example, stories of conflict and reconciliation in Season (2016)—she gradually redirected her lens toward people on the margins, people who often bear invisible wounds. She developed a gaze of care, and as a result could see more clearly that she lived in a fragmented society masked by a fantasy of unity. Flashback Diary (2024–25) is Hwang’s documentary photography series of the protests from the moment former President Yoon Suk Yeoul declared martial law to his eventual impeachment.
Hwang witnessed: While men clashed with their bodies and raised their voices in combative protest, middle-aged women stood at the front lines to protect younger women. The uniforms of the police blocking the National Assembly and confronting the protesters failed to absorb light, reflecting it instead, turning them into ghosts. In contrast, hopeful handwritten notes, ribbons, and tiny, solidaristic snowmen became fixtures of the cityscape. So did the voices of countless women beyond the frame, through whom Hwang discovered what care truly means. And just like the lines in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s 1982 novel Dictee that the artist continually returned to, it was “MAH-UHM,” the spirit: “It is burned into your ever-present memory. Memory less. Because it is not in the past. It cannot be. Not in the least of all pasts. It burns. Fire alight enflame.”
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Only seven years after the Korean War armistice, Koreans rose up in the April 19 Revolution of 1960, under martial law, to oppose the fraudulent election and dictatorship of the Syngman Rhee regime. In the October Restoration of 1972, former President Chung-hee Park imposed martial law to replace democracy with authoritarian rule in South Korea. In 1980, the Gwangju Uprising erupted in resistance to Doo-hwan Chun’s coup and the imposition of martial law, leading to mass killings. Martial law was present at every major political turning point in the country’s history. Because it granted “special measures” over freedom of the press, publication, assembly, and association, martial law was used as a tool for the government to wield coercive power over the basic rights of the people. It left indelible, inherited scars. A foreign journalist once said that democracy blooming in Korea is as unlikely as a rose sprouting from a trash can. Yet Koreans never hesitated to bleed red if it meant that rose might bloom. For more than sixty years, the people of Korea have protected that rose; the sudden reemergence of martial law was tantamount to its trampling.
To Hwang, the photographs in Flashback Diary are not a record of fear and violence. What she aimed to record with her camera was the strength of invisibles—those who built fortresses of warmth and hospitality against violence, and brought about a slow but democratic victory. The images act as a memoir of the artist as an autonomous woman engaging in dialogue with the social unrest surrounding her. As Hwang told me, “Photography becomes a tool that allows one individual to confront the multitude.” Her lens became a shield against a precarious world, and the resulting photographs became a fiercely burning “MAH–UHM” she carries, ever present.
Courtesy the artist
This article originally appeared in Aperture No. 260, “The Seoul Issue.”
