Three Artists Who Read the World Anew through Photography: Kim Shinwook, Kim Chun Soo, and Jung Jihyun - K-ARTNOW
Kim Shinwook (b.1982) Seoul, Korea

Kim Shinwook graduated from the Department of Fine Arts at Goldsmith University (2012), and completed a master’s degree in the Department of Fine Art Photography at Royal College of Art (2012). He received a doctorate in Fine Art at the University of East London (2021). He has been working as an exclusive artist at CE Contemporary in Milan.

Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

While studying in UK, Kim Shinwook had two solo exhibitions at MOKSPACE(London, UK) in 2012 and the Korean Cultural Center UK(London, UK) in 2015.

He started to build an artistic career with his solo exhibition at SPACE 22 (Seoul, Korea) in 2018. He was very much to the fore in the scene through the series of ‘Unnamed Land: Air Port City, 2015~2020’ that was exhibited several times in Seoul and Busan.

The exhibition, which recently opened at the CE Contemporary Gallery(Milan, Italy) is his first solo exhibition in Italy and showcases a series of ‘In Search of Nessie, 2018~2020’. The exhibition ran through May 10, 2022 in Milan, Italy.

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

Kim Shinwook has participated in a wide range of group exhibitions held at Korean Cultural Centre Belgium(Brussel, Belgium), Seoul Art Space Geumcheon(Seoul, Korea), Palazzo Tagliaferro Museum(Andora, Italy) and Buk Seoul Museum of Art(Seoul, Korea).

Awards (Selected)

Kim Shinwook received the 12th Ilwoo Photography Award(Ilwoo Foundation, Korea), the 7th Amado Photography Award(Amado ArtSpace, Korea) and British Institution Award(Royal Academy, UK). He has been selected the final artist of the year of the 10th KT&G SKOPF(KT&G Sangsangmadang, Korea).

Collections (Selected)

His works are in collections of museums such as Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts(Kiyosato, Japan), GoEun Museum of Photography(Busan, Korea), Oxford Oriel College(Oxford, UK), KT&G Sangsangmadang(Seoul, Korea) and Seoul Metropolitan Government(Seoul, Korea).

Originality & Identity

The artist Kim Shinwook is a meticulous observer and collector who constructs a macro worldview but also delves into details. He has mainly discovered and recorded invisible things, observing steadily with specific places and memories.

Especially, he has put an effort into searching an ambiguous landscape view and its nearby scenery to awaken various perspectives.

Kim Shinwook is called an artist who never manipulates the subject but captures the sceneries with a tranquil view. However, it is prone to reality-based, unstable, and severance that the artist wanted to show, rather than a clear and lucid world.

The research archives spur the audiences’ imagination by delivering storytelling amplified resources that are recomposing into multi-dimensional perspectives (reflecting fiction from time to time), not just only flat surface visuals.

“The hidden story comes to mind when you approached the image, and is eventually composed into a worldview that is connected one by one”

In Kim Shinwook’s artworks, several characters appear such as the surrounding landscape, the borders of countries and regions, and imaginary monsters and extinct animals that never existed before. It gives a vivid impression and freshness to audiences. Here, what arouses the audience is that the artist focuses on his experience and interest springing from personal imagery.

The artist’s works highlight not only personal experience but also the social atmosphere and historical traces not far from our stories and our world. Hence, his art world has created an individual and social area in between, and further interpretations are also boundless.

Style & Contents

Kim Shinwook provided airport pick-up service to travelers back and forth from Heathrow airport in London. The artist naturally had an interest in the scenery around the airport and the people there. The ‘Airport’ series started in 2013, but the project established its base in 2017, approaching photography type and methods as they are shown today.

Kim Shinwook’s previous works are contemplative typological photographs that are strongly connected with his memory and mentality. He started to make a relation between characters in the artwork and engaged deeply with the landscape with adequate distance from the scenery.

The airport, which exists like an island outside the city and encroaches on the surrounding area, is the center of producing an alienated periphery while crossing boundaries connecting the different areas. The artist caught the social issues hidden beneath in the real world, between the airport scenery and the people. It is expressed in his artworks with a serene view.

Current works (from 2021 to 2022) focus on the disconnection and severance that appeared in the modern and contemporary history of South Korea through the Korean war and division. Starting from the feeling of displacement and the memory of his father and his experience in North Korean families, the artist traces the historical legacy of the old Donghaebukbu-line and the whereabouts of missing Korean tigers with the attitude of a cultural anthropologist and ethnographer.

Observation and time collection, what the artist has stuck to his work, and collection, recording, and classification are the methods of his never changed mindset. Still, his art worldview is hidden, but it seems definite to exist around us. The collected materials and the breadth of his research represented the residue of imagination and reality.

Constancy & Continuity

Kim Shinwook is an artist who has received attention since his early debut. While he was in England, his domestic popularity continued steadily. Also, he was awarded ‘The British Institution Award(2013)’ prized by Royal Academy, and ‘The Young Portfolio contest program(2017)’ selected from the Kiyosato Museum of Photography, Japan, which collects and displays the works of photographers under the age of 35. As a contemporary young artist, he got great attention from various countries.

Kim Shinwook’s critical view as a new artist from the outside fosters assessing future Korean photography not just a fragmented and temporal attention. In fact, the artist’s award career has continued in Korea since then.

His artworks are collaborative with domestic and international attention in terms of worldwide topics he has dealt with. The topic he is currently focusing on are universal ones applied to any country and any ethnic group in the world such as migration and disconnection due to the war, but also scrutinize as a special case of the division of the Korean Peninsula.

Participating in various exhibitions in the UK for over 10 years, Kim Shinwook has collaborated worldwide with multi-cultural artists and curators.

He not just applied conventional photographic media but also experimented with diverse methods and techniques, Kim’s art and art activities arouse an international outlook crossing the photography and art world.

Three Artists Who Read the World Anew through Photography: Kim Shinwook, Kim Chun Soo, and Jung Jihyun
A Team
Kim Shinwook, Kim Chun Soo, Jung Jihyun

Photography has become an important art form in contemporary art and has allowed artists to embody ideas and feelings that are otherwise difficult to express in other art forms.

With the medium’s fast-changing technology, many contemporary Korean photographers use this genre to put traditional subjects into new contexts and compositions. Kim Shinwook, Kim Chun Soo, and Jung Jihyun are three of the many artists who create unique images through photography to read our contemporary world anew.


Artist Kim Shinwook. Courtesy of the Artist.

Kim Shinwook (b.1982)

Kim Shinwook’s main interest does not lie in capturing the subjects themselves when taking pictures for his artwork. He focuses instead on the peripheries and unravels these surrounding stories from an ethnographic or cultural perspective. In order to capture these narratives in his photography, Kim also conducts interviews and research to learn about the people, the landscape, history, and legends that exist within these boundaries. Thus, Kim’s artworks often accompany different kinds of archival materials. 

Kim’s works are deeply related to his personal experiences and interests. His previous works were about the marginalized stories surrounding the Heathrow Airport in London. While he was studying in the city and providing airport pick-up services for a living, Kim focused on the changing landscape, the lives of people, and the judicial system caused by the existence of the airport. Also, in relation to his family—his grandparents were originally from North Korea—Kim also studied the life of a North Korean defector living in London, or the border area between North and South Korea. Through Kim’s works that talk about the perimeters and boundaries, viewers are able to encounter new perspectives and stimulate imaginations.


Exhibition view of the 7th Amado Photography Award, Kim Shinwook Solo Exhibition "In Search of Nessie" at Amado Artspace/Lab, Seoul. November 20 - December 20, 2020. ⓒ Artist/ Amado Artspace/Lab.

Kim Shinwook received the 2013 British Institution Awards from the Royal Academy of Art (UK), the 2018 ManifestO Recontres Photographiques de Toulouse (France), the 7th Amado Photography Award (Korea), and the 2022 IL WOO Photograph Award (Korea). His works are in the permanent collection at the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts (Japan), the GoEun Museum of Photography (Korea), Oriel College, the University of Oxford (UK), Seoul City Hall (Korea), and many others. 


Artist Kim Chun Soo. Courtesy of the Artist.

Kim Chun Soo (b.1981)

Kim Chun Soo is interested in the problems in our society where digital technology rapidly develops. As a medium that captures the likeness to reality, photography inevitably captures the imperfect sides of our world, where numerous terrorisms, conflicts, and discriminations happen. Although technology is rapidly advancing, there are still malformations occurring in photography. Likewise, our society seems to develop continuously but still contains incompleteness. These inherent errors in photography and our society are similar to the artist. Thus he attempts to reveal this connection through the medium.

Kim visualizes distortion and noise in his works to reproduce the vulnerability of modern society. During his study in the UK, Kim has observed various social problems surrounding the multicultural nation. He captured and recorded places where social incidents occurred, such as where terrorist attacks took place. He distorts the image and sometimes adds texts related to the incident. These errors and distractions in the picture often look like visual damage but also a new type of visual element, which reveals the ambivalence of both photography and our society. In his works, Kim keeps the structure very simple but adds many layers of stories to his photography, such as leaving clues in the texts used in the artwork or the titles of the exhibitions.   


Exhibition view of "Kim Chun Soo: Low-cut, Low-pass" at Ilwoo Space, Seoul. August 30 - October 2, 2018. ⓒ Artist/ Ilwoo Foundation.

Kim Chun Soo had solo exhibitions at Space 22 in 2019 (Korea), Ilwoo Space in 2018 (Korea), the Insa Art Center in 2009 (Korea), and Space Baba in 2007 (Korea). He had participated in numerous group exhibitions at SeMA Bunker in 2018 (Korea), Kuenstlerhaus Bethanien in 2012 (Germany) and many others. In 2018, he was awarded the 9th Ilwoo Photography Award in the exhibition category (Korea).


Artist Jung Jihyun. Courtesy of the Artist.

Jung Jihyun (b.1983)

Jung Jihyun documents changing urban environments. He is especially interested in taking pictures of construction sites in redevelopment areas where buildings are torn down or being constructed. Jung captures the process of the changes in the urban city and attempts to contain the hidden stories surrounding the buildings. To Jung, capturing these moments is both a way to preserve the history of a city as well as a way to carry out his artistic practices. 

As an architectural photographer, Jung enters the construction or demolition sites of a redevelopment area where people are restricted from entering. Jung does not merely take photos of these places but intervenes by adding some changes to the buildings. In his Demolition Site series, for example, Jung paints the rooms of a soon-to-be-torn-down building in red to emphasize that those places were once a home to someone and are about to vanish from our lives. Jung also follows the traces of the fragments from the red walls when the site begins to get deconstructed.


Exhibition view of Jihyun Jung Solo Exhibition, "RECONSTRUCTION SITE" at Gallery O’NewWall, Seoul. April 20, 2016 - May 10, 2016. © Arist/ Gallery O’NewWall.

Jung Jihyun held solo exhibitions at SongEun Art Cube in 2013 (Korea), KT&G Sangsangmadang in 2014 (Korea), Gallery O’NewWall in 2016 (Korea), and BMW Photo Space in 2015 (Korea). Jung received the 14th SAJINBIPYONG Award, Photo Space (Korea), and was a finalist for the 6th KT&G SKOPF in 2014 (Korea). He was also nominated for the Leica Oskar Barnak Award and Prix Pictet.

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