The Seoul Museum of Art is relaunching the Seoul Photo Festival after a five-year hiatus. The 2026 Seoul Photo Festival,《Come Back Home》, is held at the Photography Seoul Museum of Art from April 9 to June 14. It is particularly meaningful as the first edition of the festival to take place since the opening of the Photography Seoul Museum of Art. More than a group exhibition bringing together works by multiple artists, this year’s festival offers a space to consider how photography reconnects our lives, relationships, and memories today.
 
Launched in 2010, the Seoul Photo Festival is one of Seoul’s leading photography festivals. Over the years, it has explored the city, community, history, and memory through the language of photography, with exhibitions such as《Returning Seoul to Seoul》(2010),《Happy Our Good Day – Revisiting the 70th Anniversary of Liberation Through Photography》(2015), and《A History of Korean Women Photographers I: Women’s Photography Movement in the 1980s》(2021).

This year, the festival takes “home” as its central keyword, a word familiar to everyone, while refusing to fix its meaning in a single definition. For some, home is the ground of everyday life; for others, it is a place left behind; and for still others, it is a state not yet reached.

The Photography Seoul Museum of Art, where this year’s festival is held, opened in May 2025 as Korea’s first public art museum dedicated specifically to photography as a medium. Since its opening, the museum has presented exhibitions such as《Radiance: Moments of Beginning, Storage Story》, and《Everything Photography Can Do》, demonstrating the history, institutional foundation, and expanded possibilities of photography. In this context, the 2026 Seoul Photo Festival《Come Back Home》marks the moment when a public museum devoted to photography begins to function more fully as a festival platform connecting citizens, artists, the city, and photographic culture.
 
 
What Makes a Home
 
The first section examines the many layers that constitute a home. A home is not formed only by walls and a roof. It also accumulates belief, memory, relationships, ways of living, and historical traces. Oh Seok-geun, Park Hyung-ryeol, Chung Kyung Ja, and Han Youngsoo present the conditions through which home is formed from different periods and perspectives.

Oh Seok-geun’s Gibok (Prayer for Blessings) 01, 20, 24, 04 (2023–2024) captures traces of faith and desire left on the surfaces of homes. Gates, walls, windows, and ornaments—the outer skin of ordinary residential spaces—become places where personal wishes and the emotional texture of daily life are revealed. Han Youngsoo’s Seoul (1956–1963) shows the streets, alleys, and everyday lives of postwar Seoul, suggesting that home does not remain confined to a private interior but expands into a radius of life formed through neighbors, streets, and the city.
 
 
Moving Homes
 
The second section approaches home not as a fixed place, but as a process of movement, settlement, loss, and reconstruction. Division and war, migration and labor, language and livelihood become reasons for some people to leave home, while for others they become the conditions under which a new home must be made.

Choi Won-jun is an artist and researcher who has explored the formation and transformation of social conditions shaped by the division of Korea and the long-term presence of U.S. military bases through photography, film, and installation.
 
In recent years, he has examined the history of African communities in U.S. military camp towns in northern Gyeonggi Province from the perspective of Afro-Asian solidarity, developing documentary projects and community-based art. This exhibition is based on a project he has carried out in Dongducheon since 2021, showing the complex layers of a region where the past and present of U.S. military camp towns overlap.
 
The exhibition includes the lives of the Nigerian Igbo community, U.S. soldiers, and women who worked in camp town clubs. Baeyounghwaseong transforms archival photographs of female entertainers who once worked in camp town clubs into rear-view images using AI technology. The work asks viewers to reconsider the kinds of gazes through which these women were objectified and defined.
 
Ham Hye-kyung’s The Man in the Grey Suit (2026) is a 36-minute single-channel video that follows a figure pushed outside the official record and the traces of a life that has disappeared. The artist traces the life of painter Lim Gun-hong, who has not been sufficiently illuminated in history or art history, bringing the gaps between personal memory and public record into the structure of the moving image.

On the Road
 
The third section expands home beyond the interior of a dwelling and into the boundaries of the life on which we stand. Kim Min, Sora Kim, Lee Sunmin, Nana & Felix, Ha Da-won, Jung Jung-ho, and Lee Han-gu capture situations in which people and places cannot settle securely, exploring the points where intimate personal experience meets social conditions.

Kim Min’s Flower Cracker 30 (2024) sensitively captures the instability of relationships and the places in which individual lives are situated. Rather than presenting home as a complete and settled space, the artist sees it as a scene where different times and emotions collide and disperse. Through this, home emerges as both a place of settlement and a boundary where conflict, distance, and the sensation of movement arise.
 
Lee Sunmin’s Moving, Fluid, The Room of Cha Sangmin (2023~) documents both the room and portrait of a young person living a fluid life in Euljiro. The artist records not only the figure but also the structure of the room, the arrangement of objects, and the traces of everyday life, revealing the sensation of an unstable life moving through the city.
 
Ha Da-won’s Persimmon Tower (2017), photographed while staying in a rural house in Jinju, quietly records the interior and exterior landscapes of a home marked by the grandmother’s touch and by the passage of family time.

In this section, home appears less as a place of stable belonging than as a territory unsettled and displaced within urban structures and social orders. The artists reveal cracks within familiar everyday landscapes through photography, crossing the boundaries between inside and outside, history and fiction, the public and the private.
 
 
Our Home
 
The final section looks at home as a space of hope and solidarity. Yang Dong-kyu, Yoon Tae-jun, Son Eun-young, Lee Ye-eun, Mioon, Shin Su-wa, and Jang Yeon-ho each question the meaning of the space in which we live together. Their works document fragments of reality while also revealing the emotional possibilities of home through photographic imagination and performative experimentation.

Lee Ye-eun’s Raising Indoor Temperature (2021) is based on the artist’s labor experience in Icheon, Gyeonggi Province, and on an attitude toward life inherited from her family. To avoid objectifying others, the artist becomes the subject of the photograph herself and records actions using her own body. The scene in which she embraces the cold exterior wall of a building with her entire body suggests an attempt to create warmth even within the repetitive time of everyday life and labor.

The artist duo Mioon explores contemporary social systems and the structures of collective desire hidden within them through media installation. Their new work Suspended Luminaries recalls chandeliers that once symbolized wealth and splendor, yet it is in fact reconstructed through digital boxes and moving images.
 
The dazzling images that continuously flow inside the boxes show how the information and images we usually believe to be “our own taste” may be edited and recommended by systems. In other words, even what appears to be an individual’s free choice may actually be the result of algorithmic selection.
 
Through smooth, cold mechanical devices and endlessly flickering screens, the work reveals how contemporary desire is produced within information systems and disappears just as quickly. Standing before the work, viewers are led to reconsider where their own tastes and choices truly come from.
 
 
From Viewing Photography to Experiencing It
 
《Come Back Home》is accompanied by a wide range of related programs. The Time of the Festival, an interview program featuring the voices of those who have shaped the Seoul Photo Festival over the past decade, looks back on the questions and concerns the festival has addressed through photography.
 
“Between Photography and the World” is a film program that revisits the origins of photography in connection with the theme of the 2026 Seoul Photo Festival. Also included are “Moving Library”, which introduces 100 photobooks by photographers active in cities across East Asia, and “Artist’s Room”, an artist talk program where visitors can hear directly about each artist’s practice.
 
This structure moves beyond the idea of photography as images simply hung on walls. Visitors encounter photography by looking, reading, listening, walking, and conversing. At a time when smartphones and social media have made photography one of the most ordinary forms of image production,《Come Back Home》invites viewers to look at photography slowly again. It asks what it means to remember a place, to record a relationship with someone, and to locate oneself within the city.

The 2026 Seoul Photo Festival《Come Back Home》does not treat photography merely as a medium of past documentation. Instead, the festival shows that photography remains an important language for reading the sensations of contemporary life, relationships, memory, and movement. Relaunched at the Photography Seoul Museum of Art, the Seoul Photo Festival can be seen as a point of departure through which Korean photography begins to establish itself within a specialized museum institution and expand into the experiences of the city and its citizens.
 
 

Exhibition Information

Title: 2026 Seoul Photo Festival《Come Back Home》
Venue: Photography Seoul Museum of Art
Address: 68 Madeul-ro 13-gil, Dobong-gu, Seoul
Dates: April 9 – June 14, 2026
Hours: Tue–Fri 10:00–20:00 / Sat–Sun & Holidays 10:00–19:00
Closed: Mondays
Participating Artists: Ki Seulki, Kim Min, Sora Kim, Kim Jun, Nana & Felix, Mioon, Park Hyung-ryeol, Son Eun-young, Shin Su-wa, Shin Hee-soo, Yang Dong-kyu, Oh Seok-geun, Yoon Tae-jun, Lee Sunmin, Lee Ye-eun, Lee Han-gu, Jang Yeon-ho, Chung Kyung Ja, Jung Jung-ho, Choi Won-jun, Ha Da-won, Han Youngsoo, Ham Hye-kyung.