In an era dominated by short-form video, photography retains a distinctive appeal that moving images cannot offer. By nature a medium that captures the moment, it remains faithful to the facts before the eye and etches itself into memory over time. A special exhibition at Museumhanmi brings together four masters of contemporary photography who documented scenes from Korea's era of industrialization.
"Every Moment Is a Flower Bud," an exhibition organized by Museumhanmi Samcheong in Jongno-gu, Seoul, honors and surveys the work of Yook Myoung-shim (1933–2025), Hong Soon-tae (1934–2016), Han Jung-sik (1937–2022) and Park Young-sook (1941–2025), the founding figures of Korean contemporary photography.
More than 110 works from the key series of these four artists, drawn from Museumhanmi's collection, are on display. The museum said the exhibition "offers an opportunity to retrace the textures of time accumulated by Korean contemporary photography, through works developed along different axes of figure and nature, record and reflection."
The exhibition opens with Yook Myoung-shim's "Baekmin" series. Over many years, Yook explored the sentiment and identity of the Korean people, documenting the diverse figures who have made up Korean society. His representative work is "Gangneung, Gangwon Province" (1983), a frontal portrait of the trance-like gaze of an elderly shaman he met by chance in Gangneung. Yook often said that just as a shaman becomes a medium, he too becomes a shaman, communing with the camera as he takes photographs. In another work, "Andong, Gyeongsangbuk Province" (1983), he captured an elderly couple he met in the countryside.
The exhibition's title is drawn from a poem of the same name by Chung Hyun-jong. On the decision to stay with black-and-white photography even in the age of digital technology and artificial intelligence (AI), Song Young-sook, director of Museumhanmi, said, "Photography holds an accumulation of time. Within it, individual lives and social history are layered together." The exhibition runs through July 19.
"Baekmin" is the first installment of Yook's "Our Own Trilogy," which continues with "Black Sand Moxibustion" and "Jangseung." Through scenes of an agrarian society, the series illuminates daily life in Korea before industrialization. The project coincided with Korea's transition from an agrarian to an industrial society and aligned with the 1970s current of reexamining tradition in the search for "what is Korean." "Baekmin" (白民), meaning "white people," is a term the artist favored as an alternative for "citizens" or "the common people."
Hong Soon-tae, through his "Seoul" and "Cheonggyecheon" series, surveys the layered passage of time the capital has undergone. Having recorded Seoul, his lifelong home, Hong consistently captured a city transforming amid rapid industrialization and the daily lives of its people. Within the "Seoul" series, "Myeong-dong" (1970) juxtaposes a woman in a miniskirt, then a newly introduced fashion item, with a woman in nun's habit, revealing the complex face of a city where tradition and modernity, absurdity and harmony overlapped.
Han Jung-sik pursued work that went beyond the shape of the subject to explore the essence of being through nature and objects. In his series "Stillness," which extended from the 1980s through the 2010s, he captured door handles, bamboo fences, rocks and waves on film. A Museumhanmi official said, "Han sought to convey through photography a world that cannot be expressed in language, and he built his own distinctive artistic world by focusing on nature and objects." The official added, "Presenting an abstract aesthetic distinct from Korean documentary photography, he captured quiet moments of nature through restrained compositions and refined perspective, opening up time for contemplation and reflection."
The exhibition concludes with Park Young-sook's "36 Portraits" series. Park focused on the social realities and repression surrounding women, exploring the absurdities of established customs and structures. Prompted by her personal experience with breast cancer, the series portrays 36 figures close to the artist, including poets, novelists and professors. By gazing deeply into the faces of contemporaries, she captured both the lives of individual figures and the currents of the era flowing behind them.
