Participating Artists
Gaeri Jeong, Damin Kim, Seongsu Kim, Junghwan Kim, Cheolseung Kim, Cheolgi Min, Baul Park, Jeongbae Park, Jineui Park, Taesung Park, Sumin Shin, Kevin You, Anjin Lee, Inhyeok Jang, Hayoon Jeon, Yunjo Jeong, Yeol Choi, Jaesung Choi, Eunju Han, Seungbeom Heo
KYOTOGRAPHIE had long been a photography festival I hoped to take part in someday. I had always regarded it as one of the most important international photography festivals in Asia, but at the time I was not yet sure how to approach its official satellite program, KG+.
Then I learned about an open call for KG+ through Fujifilm Korea. I had been setting myself the goal of being selected through an international open call, so I applied determined to be selected. Encounters, the second chapter I had been working on intensively after the first chapter, Relationships, was selected, allowing me to achieve my goal of presenting my work through an international open call for the first time.
But something unexpected happened before that. Just one month before the Kyoto exhibition, I was contacted by a gallery in Russia and invited to hold a solo exhibition of Relationships. I had assumed that the second chapter would be the first of my works to be presented abroad, but instead, within the span of a single month, I found myself presenting Relationships in Russia and Encounters in Japan.
The Kyoto exhibition also brought together works from previous exhibitions and projects I had undertaken with Fujifilm Korea, allowing me to present a total of 14 photographs. Relationships, which had been selected for Photo Festa 2025, my Hongdae work from the Seoul documentation project, and Encounters, which was still in progress at the time, were all presented together in one city, tracing the development of my work from its early stages to the present.
When I first began making this work, I could not clearly see where or how exhibiting abroad might begin. But at some point, I looked back and realized that the first and second chapters were meeting audiences in different countries and cities through entirely different paths. One came through an invitation I had never expected, while the other came through an open call I had been determined to pursue.
For that reason, I think I will remember 2026 as the year I gained the confidence that the work I had been building could cross borders. Even when I could not see a clear path ahead, I kept working, and the images I made began to meet audiences in new places, each in their own way.