All Grants | Cycle 2 –
Since 2010, Sunyoung Kim has worked at the Museum of Photography, Seoul (MoPS) as curator-in-charge of exhibition projects and international relations. She has collaborated with photographers from diverse nationalities and generations for exhibition projects. Recent exhibitions include The Centennial of Korean art photography 1920-2020 (2023, 2020); Michael Lundgren: Geomancy (2021); Brassaï, Koudelka, Giacomelli: Romantic Melancholy (2019; co-curator); Nature as a Playground: Korean and Nordic Contemporary Photography (2018; co-curator); and a series of exhibitions of emerging Korean artists. She also leads the MoPS Talent Portfolio program, which has partnered with FotoFest since 2019 by sending talented Korean photographers to the Meeting Place. This open call program serves to invigorate diverse modes of collaborations between young generations of artists and the museum. Kim is particularly enthusiastic about contemporary mixed media photographic work, as her research interests currently focus on medium specificity and its latent influence on contemporary photographic practices in post-medium conditions.
Links
Profile Links
Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media Profile
World Photography Organization Interview
Research / Curation Links
Beyond the Frames: Korean Art Photography 1920s-2020s
Publication Links
Shine Brightly: Korean Photography Since 1957 (Thames & Hudson, October 2026)
Other Links
10×10 Research Grant Presentation Video (Sunyoung Kim —00:58:10)
Summary of Research Supported by 10×10 Photobooks Grant:
Unraveling Women’s Stories on the Page: The Advent of Women’s Magazines in the 1960s in S. Korea
Women’s photographic history in Korea, where the introduction of photography was under the leadership of masculine colonial power, was little known under the twofold veils.* It is a new field of study, and only recently has in-depth research begun on women’s achievements and trajectories in relation to photography.** Previously, those who study Korean photographic history, rather focused on themes like how photography had been operated in collusion with colonial powers, how the case of photography beyond this colonial boundary has become possible, and finding clues of Korean-led moves for defining history, made by the hands of Koreans, rightly male Koreans.
However, there was a female photographer shining like a flash in such a dark period (1920s~1930s) when photography was adopted and socially used in this country. It was a mixed time of oppressive colonization and expansive moves for modernization. Hyangwondang (香園堂, a pseudonym) is the first female photographer, and worked for Cheonyoundang photo studio, the first Korean photo studio offering services to female customers. At that time, men and women strictly kept their distance from each other, and so it was necessary to have a woman photographer for female clients. Another female photographer, Hongkyung Lee, also answered that need, and eventually opened a photo studio only for female clients in Seoul in 1921. Such movements by female photographers existed but were few and felt like grains of sand in the vast ocean.
In conjunction with Korean women’s photographic history, there also exists a history of photobooks by women in the country. The first appearance of Korean female photographers’ work on the page dates to the 1960s. Popular magazines, which produced and consumed many photographic images, began to be published in large numbers in the 1950s. And from the 1960s, female photographers started to play a key role on the printed page, particularly for women’s magazines like Yeowon (1956~1970) and Yeosang (1962~1967), the two most prominent women’s magazines during the 1960s. This was the initial appearance of women’s works in printed format. Although their printed works did not appear in individually-focused publications like monographs, but rather they were published as much more fragmentary press photographs or in photo essays, similar to small portfolios, in which the photographers took seriously regarded how to visually highlight topics and arrange images in conjunction with texts. Representative female photographers, who printed their photographs on the page, were Yongsoon Kim, Kyungja Min, Moonyhe, Youngsook Park, Sunok Kim and Junghee Kim. Particularly, Kyungja Min’s so-called “photo story” series (1964) on the pages of Yeowon magazine was a new type of work that had never been published before. Min created a visual story based on a short novel written by distinguished writers of the time. The images were in the form of a documentary; while seemingly surrealistic, they were completely based on fiction. Youngsook Park’s photographs in the “Poetry and Photograph” section on Yeosang’s pages are significant for their use of mutually disparate things co-existing; realistic and surreal moods, particular rhythm of texts and photographs, and different subjects and styles of photography, including still-life, portrait and landscape.
My research focuses on the printed materials of Korea’s women photographers, exploring more in depth the styles and subjects of each example, particularly their distinctive voices in conjunction with texts and images, with the goal of shedding light on the very first struggles and movement of women and printed photography in South Korea.
* The word, “The twofold veils” alludes that Korean photography history has been generally described with predominance of ‘colonial’ and “male” gazes. The biased reading of history with these two axes distracts from noting the achievements of female photography. So the colonial and male gazes are compared to the twofold veils that cover the hidden truth.
** The research on women’s photography history in S. Korea has begun in earnest on occasion of the 12th Seoul Photo Festival at SEMA Buk-Seoul Museum of Art. Korean photography history researcher, LEE Kyungmin, curated the special exhibition The History of Women in Korean Photography I: Women’s Photography Movements in the 1980s as a part of the program and introduced his research on the theme so far.