I was selected for the URBAN Photo Awards and presented Encounters in an exhibition marking the beginning of Trieste Photo Days 2026. The exhibition was held at Trieste International Airport in Italy, where more than 200 photographs were shown from thousands of images submitted by photographers around the world. Only eight portfolios were presented as complete series, and Encounters was selected as one of them.
The exhibition brought together eight portfolios exploring different forms and places through a single question:
“What happens to a place when people pass through it, and what remains once they have gone?”
The organizers explained that few places make this question as visible as an airport. Airports are places where countless people, each with different reasons for traveling and different destinations, remain for a short time before dispersing again in their own directions. At the same time, Trieste Airport functions as an international point of intersection between movement, culture, and the region, allowing the work to be encountered not only by visitors who come specifically to see the exhibition, but also by travelers who come across the photographs by chance.
In this sense, I found the connection between the airport and Encounters particularly interesting. The work itself is made by seeking out places where people with different purposes happen to cross paths, recording moments when people with no prior connection briefly appear as a single “we.” The official article also described Encounters, the second chapter of the trilogy, as a work in which the paths of strangers overlap by chance and their otherwise separate movements briefly form a single scene.
The eight portfolios were by artists from Italy, France, Germany, Russia, the United States, and South Korea, and I participated as the only Korean artist and the only Asian artist among them. For me, it was also meaningful that, among the many works submitted from around the world, it was not a single image but the entire series Encounters that was selected as one of only eight portfolios and presented within the setting of an international airport.
What interested me most was the way the question I had continued to pursue through the work naturally met the question posed by the exhibition through its location. It felt as though the work itself had found a place and an opportunity that suited its own meaning. There was something strange and moving about seeing Encounters, having left my hands as its creator, begin to prove itself on its own.
Trieste Photo Days 2026 – Official Article
Urban Photo Awards 2026 - Official Article