The Art of Truth-seeking in Han Kang’s We Do Not Part
By Arla Hoxha
A newborn’s white gown—never worn. Melting ice. A miniature forest of dark wood. Flashes of violence of Korean dictatorships. Two women holding tight to a white cloth sheet as they walk into the sea, like a funeral rite. How to account for loss—the kind that leaves a hole, somewhere you can’t place, for someone you only ever knew in stories? How can one carry their grief through life? Han Kang’s collaboration with her friend and filmmaker IM Heung-soon at the 57th Carnegie International (2018) was a construction of mixed-media installations, performances, and films providing room for this reflection. Housing work from 32 artists and art collectives The Carnegie International, held annually at The Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, invites visitors “to explore what it means to be ‘international’ at this moment in time.” Kang’s 2021 I Do Not Bid Farewell rendered in English as We Do Not Part is a thematic continuation of the abstract short film with the same name, portraying two women carrying a white sheet. We Do Not Part is brought in English as a joint effort between e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris. Kang’s first book to be translated into English after she was awarded the Nobel in Literature in 2024, it is perhaps her darkest work to date.
Kang’s dreamlike novel centers around the friendship between Kyungha and Inseon in an intense period of their lives, as they try to uncover personal histories and their connection to what is now remembered as the “Jeju 4.3 Incident.” 45 years after, anyone who would speak of the massacre “was liable to arrest by the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) or its successors, followed by beatings, torture, and a long prison sentence administered under the terms of the National Security Law, enacted in December 1948 and still on the books in 1998.” For the author, the inspiration behind the novel comes from her experience living in Jeju villageand interacting with those who witnessed its aftermath. Kang describes in an interview for The Korea Herald how she received a detailed account of the events from her elderly landlady as she was helping the woman carry out a task in town. Similarly, Inseon is told about the massacre by an elder in her community before she starts her research. Much like her characters, Kang’s art is not just a form of self-expression—it is a way to get a better hold of the truth. She does not shy away from detail in her descriptions of the massacre.
“The soldiers were hurling bodies into the ocean, and people lay bloodied, their faces in the sand. At first, I thought they were clothes floating on the water, but it turned out they were all people, dead people.”
She uses her usual harrowing prose to recall events and give voice to people who still haven’t received apologies over 75 years later.
We Do Not Part is the story of two friends, both haunted by ghosts of their nation’s past, intertwined with their own. They seek to escape them through their art but get enveloped deeper into these histories, histories that the Korean government sought to hide. These stories are violent; they bare their teeth and demand attention. First, they rupture the protagonist’s sleep—they come to her in dreams of ice and blood, as rows of dark flooded logs of trees. The dreams follow her in her wake, in the dead of winter and in the midst of summer, suffocating her and inducing migraines, tracking her steps from Seoul to Jeju. To untangle these threads between dream and reality, to expel these hauntings from her body, they find their way to the page, as Kyungha writes about the massacres that torment her. Later they reveal themselves as memoriesof the protagonist’s best friend, Inseon, who has sought to wrestle with the past through another form of narrative—film.
The book starts with Kyungha’s distress and dreams of snow and her attempts to write a book. The image of black trees chopped down, graves covered by water, and the snow— snow that lasts for centuries—are remains of a half-forgotten memory pushing the protagonist to her limits, as it tries to float to the front of her mind. Much like the ‘I Do Not Bid Farewell’ film, the simple images reflect something deeper, a feeling of pain or loss that one can’t quite define. It is unclear where these shifting, uncertain images are coming from, whether they pertain to events witnessed or passed down. They lead Kyungha to spend her days at the library researching the massacre in the town of G—, trying to produce the novel as fast as she can in hopes that once it is on the page, it will cease to haunt her:
“The book came out almost to the day in mid May. The nightmares, unsurprisingly, continued regardless. In retrospect it baffles me. Having decided to write about mass killings and torture, how could I have so naively— brazenly— hoped to soon shirk off the agony of it, to so easily be bereft of its traces?”
For a while, Kyungha considers ending her life, leading her to write a short story about a melting woman made of snow entitled ‘Farewell’. She later deems this an unfit ending. Instead, she contacts her filmmaker friend Inseon—in art, to give these images life.
Inseon herself becomes obsessed with this project. Kyungha’s visions remind her of family history, which Inseon starts to unravel slowly. The novel transforms into an odyssey in candlelight—the pair goes through Inseon’s family history while uncovering what happened inthe Jeju uprising. They piece together the stories but are still unable to identify the bodies of Inseon’s relatives among the 30,000 other deaths. Art becomes the way personal and national consciousness merge, slowly coming to light. Images that start in real life, in memories of others, infiltrate the art and reappear as dreams. Kang’s troubled characters voice phantasms that do not only plague their consciousness. Kyungha tries to limit her writing to her office, to a specific location for a few minutes a day, to isolate it—to keep it from infecting other parts of her life. Yet, she remembers a sensation that was only experienced in nightmares of extreme violence, as a uniformed man pushes a bayonet into her chest. As Inseon recounts her mother’s stories and goes through her family’s archives, she brings to the forefront forgotten memories and rewrites her understanding of them. Simultaneously, through these characters and novels, Han Kang is rewriting collective memory for Korea and the readers who see these events through the eyes of her characters.
More than just speaking up about these taboo events by providing a personal connection between the characters and the massacres, Kang engages with the role of art in truth-seeking. The images and memories are not the only ones that torment—the character’s work torments them too, gnawing until it is pursued. The need to let the truth out, the need to understand, can haunt one just as much as the truth. And once the truth is out—once the pursuit takes place, once Kyungha starts writing, once the film starts rolling—the wound still bleeds. The processes of filmmaking and writing, encompassing the research that the readers witness in the novel, feel like an unfolding of truth. Truth seems to be at the core of what preoccupies both Kang and her artists. Kyungha describes “Inseon’s face as she slowly pieced together her words, like someone doomed to only ever speak the truth” —like an oracle or a prophet.
“In that moment, as though someone has flicked a switch, my dream roars back, so vivid and tangible I stop breathing for a second. The squishing of my trainers, the sponginess of the ground underfoot, the water seeping up from beneath the snow. The tide rising up to my knees in the time it would take to blink, engulfing the black tree torsos, the burial mounds.”
It is impossible to part with these images, the shared memory, the truths these characters are given. Inseon cannot cease researching and filming, even after Kyungha repeatedly asks her to stop. Art can heal as much as it breaks. These artists dig up pieces of themselves and stitch them together again into their work.
Art serves as an attempt to grasp something ungraspable. A shifting thing like truth canonly be approached through a medium that can move with it. Kang’s approach to art confirms this idea—retaking and remaking themes and images until the meaning is unveiled, even between different forms. Remaking and perfecting—not until art can fully resemble life, but until a crux is reached, a feeling has crystallized. Through this lens, the piece of art does not need to be perfect, if anything could even be defined by such a term. In fact, Kang’s flowery prose can at times obscure meaning, rather than enhance it. The piece should be viewed as part of the body of work, like Kang’s installations and collections of novels—together, an inquiry directed to revealing certain truths, in this case, about Korean history.
“Life is exceedingly vulnerable,” Kyungha acknowledges at the beginning of the novel. What will matter when we are gone is the images we leave behind. Kang’s storytelling is truth-seeking as much as history-making. She weaves a string of images through her words, lining them up in the form of a novel. These images will not leave us, they will be remembered.We Do Not Part reminds us why it matters to speak up and try to stick together, even when it snows.
