Within the military compound of the Armed Forces Gwangju Hospital, treatment and repression existed in uneasy proximity. During the May 1980 uprising, civilians and students injured by martial-law troops were brought here for medical treatment, while some of those detained and interrogated by the military also passed through its wards and rooms.

A hospital is normally associated with refuge and recovery, yet here the boundaries between care, custody, and state authority became blurred. Behind the walls, wounds inflicted in the streets entered an institution still controlled by the same military system that had produced them.

The hospital eventually moved away in 2007, leaving its old buildings behind. Empty wards, operating rooms, corridors, and fading surfaces now hold little of the urgency that once filled them. What remains is a place caught between healing and violence, where the physical traces have grown quiet while the memory of May has not.