Documentary photographer Kim Ji-youn has spent more than two decades photographing Korean minority communities across Asia. Her work began in the 1990s in northeastern China, where she documented malnourished North Korean orphans who had crossed the border in search of food. From there, her focus widened to ethnic Koreans living as permanent outsiders in their adopted countries — including “Chosen-seki,” stateless descendants of Koreans who settled in Japan before 1945 and still face discrimination and even hate crimes today.
Kim’s photography also covers Koryo-saram communities in Russia, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan — descendants of the roughly 172,000 Koreans forcibly deported to Central Asia by Stalin in 1937. Many of her subjects went on to become pioneering farmers, turning wilderness into fertile farmland and, in some cases, becoming celebrated heroes of Soviet labor.
Her book, Korean Diaspora (released by Noonbit Publishing), gathers these images along with the personal histories behind them. Kim has said she wanted to give her earlier photographs the backstories they were missing, describing her subjects as people whose “unrequited love” for a homeland they were forced to leave has never faded.
Kim’s path into documentary photography was shaped by an encounter in 1998 with Park Doo-ri, a survivor of Japan’s wartime sexual slavery system, whom she photographed while volunteering at a shelter for survivors. That experience, she has said, taught her how to connect with the people she photographs — and set her on the path toward documenting the “permanent aliens” of modern Asian history.
Source: The Korea Times — “Survivors of xenophobia, hate crime captured in photos”