Official memory of the April 3rd Incident on Jeju Island In 1948('4·3') had been constructed and long fixed around the myth of communist rebels' insurrection. Collective memory on both the national and local level was almost the same. But it must be admitted that the reality of 4·3 included at least the following three facets the islanders' resistance against newly oppressing forces; local leftists' somewhat hazardous armed uprising, and a massacre enacted by national army, police and rightist factions. Nevertheless the truth of 4·3 had been sealed and confined during almost half a century.
In parallel with the advancement of the democratic movement since the later 1980s, the Truth-seeking Movement about 4·3 has also developed. At last, the 4·3 Truth Commission was constituted in 2000 on the basis of a Special Act, and it submitted an official report on April, 2003. The report proved and clarified the above-mentioned three aspects of 4·3, especially recommending that the state should remember the reality of 4·3 as a historical tragedy and make an effort to futurise the memory. In fact, such achievements of the report must be seen as a natural result of a long march of the Truth Recovery Movement, which would be constituted with the categories of working as truth search, its capture and confirmation, and finally its restoration.
In that context, a cultural movement also arose and developed since the end of the 1980s. With various forms and methods of representation of 4·3, it realized the subjects' specific aims and intents, so to speak, of catching up and anchoring the floating memories, of making the repressed or sunken memories arise, and of evocating or transmitting them to others, especially to the young generation. On that reason, it can be rightly called as Cultural-Representation-of-4·3 Movement, or simply as the 4·3 Cultural Movement ('4·3 CM').
Representation was accomplished both as a realistic one focused on the incident and as a symbolic one reflecting mental images or social memories of 4·3 Besides some individual works in literature and art, the main parts of it were comprised of collective and organizational works of testimony, commeorative ritual, open set drama, sharmanic performance, painting, music, photograph and film.
Moreover, the 4·3 C.M. was focused on finding out and representing the meamng of the people's uprising and being massacred, in direct opposition to the dominant discourse or official memory. Such an effort was also a kind of hard fight for truth recovery. This is the reason why we must locate the 4·3 C.M. on the very arena of politics of memory, deal with it as a chain of memory struggle, and investigate and analyse scrupulously its results and effects. The feature of that struggle was more of simple confrontation and confiet of existing opponents. Rather, it seems to have connoted some kinds of innovation, revival, transformation, and transcendence as significant elements of meanmg.
The 4·3 C.M. has made the victim-and-survivors' deep memories passive in character to change into active memories spouting eventually with their own voices. The repressed memory has been transmuted and dispaced to self-confirmation. Agian, it cracked the structure of official memory and disturbed the order of social memory, finally to become the materials and starting point of a new public memory about 4·3.
As a result, the 4·3 C.M. has become a determinant moment for formation of new collective memory and reconstitution or innovation of historical memory. This process might be portrayed as a collective/communal/social experiencing of a transmutation from the old ideological memory to a new countermemory through a fierce struggle for recovery of the historical truth. This is a theoretical suggestion achieved from my own exploration into the 4·3 C.M.