Exhibition view of “Koo Bohnchang’s Voyages” at SeMA Seosomun Main Branch, Seoul. (December 14, 2023 – March 10, 2024). Courtesy of the museum.
The Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) organized a large retrospective exhibition of Koo Bohnchang (b. 1953), a pioneering figure in contemporary Korean photography, before opening a photography museum scheduled for 2024. Koo Bohnchang’s Voyages, the artist’s first solo show in a public art museum, showcases 1,100 works and materials, including the artist’s early works, and collected materials from his activities as a curator. The exhibition selects 43 series from the artist’s oeuvre, presenting them in a thematic arrangement of “Cabinet,” “The Journey of Adventure,” “One World,” “Temple of the Spirit,” and “Open Room.”
Koo Bohnchang, who majored in business administration and briefly worked in a company, left his job after six months and went to Germany to eventually become a photographer. In 1988, he held The New Wave of Photography exhibition at the Walker Hill Art Center (May 18–June 17), marking the beginning of contemporary Korean photography. In this exhibition, he introduced a revolutionary change to Korean photography with his new concept and form of “making photos”—photography taking off from its traditional role of recording or documenting and becoming an art form charged with subjective expressions. For his significant contribution to the international recognition of Korean photographic art, Koo received the 47th Republic of Korea Culture and Arts Award as a 2015 Person of Merit, Development of Culture and Arts citation.
