Korean women photographers are reshaping how stories are seen and remembered, using the camera as both a personal and political tool. Through intimate portraits, experimental narratives, and sharp social observation, they explore identity, gender, history, and everyday life in contemporary Korea and beyond. This article highlights female Korean photographers whose work challenges conventions and expands the visual language of photography.
Park Youngsook
Park Youngsook is a first-generation female photographer. She’s played a massive role in the history of Korean photography as well as the feminist movement. Park has created stunning, evocative images about themes like femininity, sexuality and societal oppression. One of her most famous work is her series ‘Mad Women (1999) which talks about women constrained by patriarchal structures. Park sadly passed away this year, but she has left a lasting legacy as a trailblazer.
Ji Yeo
Ji Yeo is a contemporary photographer who focuses on female identity and self-worth. She’s currently based in New York.
During her series ‘The Beauty Recovering Room’ she photographs rooms where young women are recovering from plastic surgery. What originally inspired her to photograph this series is the fact that she was considering getting procedures done.
She also has a series ‘Somewhere on the Path I See You’ where she focuses on women with eating disorders and anxieties.
Koo Seongyoun
Our next photographer on the list is Koo Seongyoun. Koo plays with the context of everyday objects. Her work opens the dialogue of perception and how context is everything. Later on she also started constructing landscapes by hand, which distorted the line between reality and representation. Gallery HK wrote: “The candy peonies which are born remind the viewer of Korean minhwa (folk painting) screens from the Joseon Dynasty or maybe even a Dutch still-life painting of sumptuous flowers in a vase.”
Sung Ji-Yeon
Sung is a contemporary photographer focused on portraiture. She reinterprets everyday scenes in a minimalist way inspired by theater sets. In her artist statement, she states that she’s really interested in showing the presence of the individual with her work. There are questions when the moment of banality switches to strangeness and that mystery is where her work focuses on.
Hwang Yezoi
Hwang Yezoi is a multidisciplinary artist. She’s involved in writing, video and film production and is even a poet. Throughout her life she’s had to process several family traumas like the failure of her father’s business, the knowledge of her mother’s newborn and eventually her mother running away for ten years. Her art is a means of processing and sharing her anxieties.
This article was originally published in our magazine.
