Installation view of 《All That Photography》 © Photography Seoul Museum of Art

Today, mid-career figures in the Korean art world—Kim Tschoon Su, Suh Yongsun, Lee Inhyeon, and Ahn Kyuchul, all graduates of Seoul National University—formed the artist collective “Seoul, 80” in 1980. Using the SNU campus and everyday urban scenery as backdrops, they photographed their surroundings and presented the results in slide-based exhibitions. Though these works—capturing sensations of time and space through the flow of memory and perception—were later overshadowed, their traces resurfaced in different forms within the artists’ individual paintings.

Such cases represent experimental engagements with photography by progressive artists during the 1960s to 1980s, yet few people— even among specialists—remember them today. In Korean contemporary art history, photography has occupied an ambiguous position. From the 1960s through the 2000s, the Korean art scene produced numerous masters and diverse movements amid the tension between modernism and realism.

Photography, however, functioned not only as an autonomous genre centered on documentary photographers, but also as a multifaceted medium “utilized” by progressive and avant-garde artists. Scholars focused on photography as a genre tend to exclude experimental photographic practices of the 1960s–80s from mainstream photographic history, while contemporary art historians often treat photography merely as a technical medium.

The opening special exhibition 《All That Photography》, held since late last year at the Photography Seoul Museum of Art in Chang-dong, Seoul, clearly addresses this divided perception of photography. Curator Han Hee-jin assembled over 300 works and archival materials by 36 major artists who have shaped the trajectory of Korean contemporary art. She argues that the sheer number of cases in which non-photographers employed photography demands historical contextualization, and that progressive artists—who diverged from institutional mainstream movements such as Informel painting (gestural abstraction) and monochrome painting—advanced toward new art through photography.

Within this framework, the exhibition unfolds across Galleries 1 through 4, demonstrating how photography has transformed Korean artists’ language, sensibility, and modes of thought over the past half-century. Beginning with senior pioneers Lee Seungteak (94) and Kim Kulim (90), who early on adopted photography as a significant expressive means, and culminating in the final gallery dedicated to realist artist Min Joungki (77)—whose work fused photography, performance, and printmaking to channel the turbulent spirit of the 1980s—the exhibition brings together, for the first time, works and materials by key artists who have engaged the photographic medium over the past fifty years.

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