Minouk Lim is a powerful chronicler of Korea’s national suffering. At the opening of the 2014 Gwangju Biennale, Lim installed two shipping containers bearing the remains of civilians massacred during the brutal Korean War (1950–53) who never received proper burials. Their descendants were greeted by the mothers of those killed by the military in the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, which spurred Korea’s democratization movement. In the same edition of the Biennale, Lim also displayed the first iteration of Mr. Eui Jin Chai and 1,000 Canes (2014–20), which comprises more than 1,370 wooden walking sticks carved by Eui Jin Chai, who was a survivor of the Mungyeong massacre on December 24, 1949, when the South Korean army slaughtered 88 villagers suspected of communist sympathies. Chai lost nine family members, including his mother and his brother, whose body covered his during the mass execution; he spent the rest of his life, until his death in 2016, attempting to keep alive memories of the crimes denied by the state for more than five decades.

Chai took up his practice of carving roots and branches to overcome the intense grief and suffering he had experienced, and to communicate “things that are impossible to be rendered in words.” Carrying Chai’s legacy forward, Lim re-installed the canes for the 13th Gwangju Biennale in 2021 within the eerily abandoned military hospital where, during the citizens’ resistance to a violent army crackdown on protesting students, doctors had defiantly treated many of the wounded. Recognizing her position as an intermediary between the legacy of Chai’s trauma embodied in the carved walking sticks, and a public sphere torn between the suppression and revelation of the past, Lim harnesses Chai’s canes as a symbol of resilience and support—“wounded healers,” the artist calls them—for the long, collective process of recovery.