Lost in Honam: Notes from the Punishment Room

By Isaiah Winters

When photographing derelict structures, there’s a thrill I get from combing through the mundane, personal minutia of strangers’ lives. The most interesting details tend to be analogue and therefore easiest to forget over time, as there’s no online record granting them a form of digital immortality. The value of these unrecorded, offline finds is immense to me, which is why I invest so much time searching for and photographing them.

For this issue of Lost in Gwangju, I’ve spent a great deal of my recent free time doing an amateur corpus analysis of messages I found scrawled on the walls of a dozen or so “punishment rooms” (징벌실) within the nowshuttered Gwangju Prison in Munheung-dong. There’s nothing academic about my analysis, and my methodology is spotty, but I think the messages I’ve found nevertheless hold deep value: They lay bare many of the thoughts and emotions that the human spirit conjures up while locked away in a solitary cage.

It’s worth noting that this entire analysis was made possible due to a quirk of the old Gwangju Prison: the prevalence of wallpapered cells. For whatever reason, the prison staff must have okayed a significant amount of decorative autonomy for prisoners, as strikingly different wallpaper designs, colors, and customizations can be seen in each cell. The punishment rooms I analyzed also had wallpaper, though only a simpler, uniform shade of white. This spartan design choice ended up being the perfect canvas for preserving everything the prisoners wrote, both on the newer surface wallpaper and beneath, where underlying layers retained far older messages.

In this article, I’ll focus on three very different messengers from just a few punishment rooms.

The most consistent writer within all the punishment rooms I searched was definitely “Dad at Late Dawn.” I know to call him this because he signed one of his five letters to his family as such (늦은 새벽 아빠가). The first of his letters I discovered, likely written to his daughter, was both his most poetic and crushing:

Because the word “father” is a strong name, even though things are hard, I can’t express how I feel. I just bury everything in my heart. Today, too, I put my life in a glass of alcohol.

In another letter to his own father, “Dad at Late Dawn” reflected on the following:

Father, At the time, why didn’t I know my father’s generosity? I apologize with my tears.

Most messages from “Dad at Late Dawn,” though, circled back to his daughter. Unfortunately, small parts of the following letter have been lost to mold, water damage, and decay; however, given the author’s writing tendencies in other letters, we can assume his message went more or less like this:

Beloved daughter,

I miss you so much. I don’t know how I can pay my daughter back. / Through the trust of love, I’ll protect you. / The greatest thing I’ve done in the world is meet my daughter. / I miss you, but through the current pain, I believe our relationship will strengthen. / With that thought, I close my day.

I love you. “From Dad at Late Dawn”

What hit home hardest about “Dad at Late Dawn” and his heart-rending messages was the fact that they remained plastered to the walls of the punishment room where he’d been locked up. The looming questions is, obviously, why weren’t they ever sent? I even found two envelopes ready to go – one for his daughter and the other for his parents – though curiously without any mailing addresses on them. This unfortunate anticlimax reminded me of the Moody Blues song “Nights in White Satin” and

▲ Two envelopes ready to go from “Dad at Late Dawn,” though sadly left unsent. its line “…letters I’ve written, never meaning to send.” With no answers to the above question, I now share a bit of “Dad at Late Dawn’s” feelings of regret and unfulfillment.

Speaking of melancholic tracks, another way prisoners in the punishment rooms made the most of their low-stimulation environment was to recall music. This they did by writing out the lyrics of entire songs on the walls as best they could. One inmate was by far the most prolific lyricist in all the punishment rooms. When looking over his tracks, I wondered if he’d sung these tunes softly to himself as the hours ticked by, like in a noraebang from hell. Below is a track list I’ve put together of all the songs this particular inmate jotted down. The first track is the most interesting, as it was released in September 2013, which means the prisoner must have been locked up in that specific punishment room within about two years of the prison’s closure in October 2015.

It’s no surprise that the tracks aren’t happy ones, with bad breakup ballads being a strong theme overall. The first and second tracks are the newest and oldest, respectively, bookending the playlist from 2003–2013. The decade they span suggests the age of the prisoner who wrote them down, likely young-ish, somewhere in his 20s or 30s. Interestingly, English features heavily in the final track, which the prisoner included and wrote flawlessly. Beyond these details, there’s nothing more I can say about the punishment room’s great lovelorn lyricist.

Track 1: 나란 놈이란 – 임창정 Track 2: 소주한잔 – 임창정 Track 3: 발자국 – 먼데이 키즈 Track 4: 남자야 – 먼데이 키즈 Track 5: 이별택시 – 김연우 Track 6: 멋지게 이별 – SG워너비 Track 7: 청혼 – 노을

The final message featured in this article is about as dark as it gets: murder and the death penalty. In one of the punishment rooms, I came across a short but disturbing paragraph recounting the horrific crime of an inmate at the prison. When translated into English, the story, which admittedly has a confusing timeline, goes as follows:

In one of the cells, the death row inmate Kang Jong-gap was sentenced to life in prison. His sister-in-law took care of him while he was in prison and gave him money after he got out. He lost it gambling and then bothered her and his older brother for more money. He ended up killing his sister-in-law and got the death penalty.

<He still likes gambling.>

The part that gets me is the understated coda written in present tense. In four simple words, the writer manages to cheapen the life lost and dispel any hope for remorse on the part of the murderer. The ending also grants an air of credibility to the account, like the writer himself had observed the killer’s unrepentant smirk over a petty wager in prison. In short, the final line makes for very good writing, but is it anything more than half-garbled gossip?

After a bit of online sleuthing, a more detailed account of what happened emerged, though the source isn’t the most reputable, so take the following with a grain of salt. There is indeed a Gwangju Prison inmate named Kang Jonggap who was sentenced to death in the year 2000. Prior to that sentence, he’d served 20 years for an earlier murder, and when he got out, he pestered his sister-in-law for money to cover gambling debts. This she refused, in addition to his request to move in with her, so, consumed with hatred for her (and her mother), he killed them both with a hammer.[1]

It may surprise some to know that “Killer Kang” is likely still alive, assuming he hasn’t died of natural causes. This is because just before the turn of the century, capital punishment, which is still technically legal in South Korea but de facto abolished, became much harder to enforce. Since then, sentences like in the above case have often been commuted to life in prison. In light of this fact, if Kang is indeed still alive, I can’t help but wonder whether he still likes gambling.

So, that’s it for this article. I still have many more untranslated notes from various punishment rooms, so if I have the time to go through them, there will likely be an addendum to this article next month. We’ll see.

Photographs by Isaiah Winters.

▲ A few of the things left on a balcony overlooking the prison’s auditorium.

[1] kokoeun12. (2019, October 7). 우리가 대한민국 사형수 61명, 그들은 어떤 죄를 저질렀을까? <두번째> [61 South Korean death row inmates; what crimes did they commit? (Part 2)]. koko님의블로그 [Koko's Blog]. https://blog.naver.com/ kokoeun12/221670380384

Born and raised in Chino, California, Isaiah Winters is a pixel-stained wretch who loves writing about Gwangju and Honam, warts and all. He particularly likes doing unsolicited appraisals of abandoned Korean properties, a remnant of his time working as an appraiser back home. You can find much of his photography on Instagram @d.p.r.kwangju.