Yeongseon Pond: Lost Meeting Place of Photographer Choi Gye-bok and Independence Figures Hyun Jeong-geon & Hyun Gye-ok
Creatrip Team
a month ago
A memorial marker for Yeongseon Pond (영선못) stands near the main gate of Daegu National University of Education, though weathered and hard to read. The pond once covered roughly 20,000 pyeong and served as a popular riverside retreat for swimming, fishing and ice-skating, and helped with irrigation and flood control before it was filled in during urban development (around 1970). Yeongseon Pond is historically notable for two local stories: first, it was the site of photographer Choi Gye-bok’s earliest known work, “Spring at Yeongseon Pond,” part of a newly donated group of 1930s–40s photographs to the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art; second, it was a secret nightly meeting place for Hyun Jeong-geon (an independence activist and brother of writer Hyun Jin-geon) and Hyun Gye-ok, who later crossed into China and became the first female member of the Uiyeoldan (의열단) militant independence group. The article suggests the site marker could better engage visitors by including Choi’s photo and a brief history of the pond and these figures. Though the pond is gone, its cultural and historical legacy remains in the neighborhood.
