Human Acts — Filming Locations & Real Places

After reading Human Acts, you naturally find yourself looking up where this story actually took place.

The novel isn't told by one person, but through six alternating voices: Jeong-dae, shot dead by martial law soldiers; Dong-ho, who dies helping identify the bodies at Sangmugwan; the survivors Eun-sook, Jin-su, and Seon-ju, each carrying that day for the rest of their lives; and finally, a mother who has lost her son.

Sangmugwan, where Dong-ho helps identify the dead in the novel, isn't an invented space. It still stands today, inside the restored Old Jeonnam Provincial Office complex, as Exhibition Hall 5 of the 5·18 Archives.

Dong-ho is widely known to be modeled on a real victim, Moon Jae-hak — sixteen years old at the time, a first-year student at Gwangju Commercial High School.

국립5·18민주묘지 추모탑, 광주 · Wikimedia Commons

The novel doesn't shy away from the fact that Dong-ho dies in the early hours of May 27, during the crackdown on the Provincial Office. His family begged him to leave. He stayed anyway, and that was the end for him.

Nor does it look away from what happens to the survivors. Eun-sook goes on to fight censorship at a publishing house, carrying the memory of that day with her. Jin-su survives detention and torture but is undone by guilt and takes his own life. Seon-ju devotes herself to human rights work but is never fully free of what the torture left behind.

The first time I read this novel, I didn't fully understand why it spends so much time on what happens to these people afterward. Reading it again, I understood: the story it's telling isn't only 'what happened that day,' but 'how people went on living for decades after.'

The novel alludes several times to helicopter gunfire — a claim long denied. Looking into it, I learned that physical evidence for it still exists. A 2016-2017 forensic investigation confirmed 245 bullet marks on the Jeonil Building; that's where the building's current name, 'Jeonil Building 245,' comes from.

I also learned that the National 5·18 Cemetery and the old Mangwol-dong cemetery are two different places. When the new national cemetery was built in 1997, most of the remains were relocated there, but the original burial ground still exists separately.

국립5·18민주묘지 묘역, 광주 · Wikimedia Commons

Since 2025, the city of Gwangju has divided the novel's settings into two official literary walking routes: the 'Boy's Path' (5·18 historic sites) and the 'Author's Path' (the neighborhood where Han Kang actually grew up).

Knowing that the author herself had already moved to Seoul before the uprising happened — and wasn't there — makes you reconsider why she carried this story regardless, and what it means to hold onto something you didn't personally experience, this precisely and for this long.

After Han Kang won the Nobel Prize in 2024, Moon Jae-hak's mother speaking to the press about her son and this novel drew renewed attention around the same time.

This site doesn't present this journey as a pilgrimage or a photo tour. It's a walk through ground where a massacre and an uprising actually happened.

Reading the novel and walking through Gwangju is closer to facing, together, what happened there, the long silence that followed, and the record that remains today. What Dong-ho's mother never manages to let go of, even after the last page — that's something only a reader of the novel itself can really know.