By Suevon Lee
Over the last three years, Cindy Hwang has invited nearly 200 individuals into her New York City living room studio. There, against the backdrop of a bare white wall and a hardwood floor, the photographer has snapped full-length portraits of actors, teachers, comics, athletes, executives and retirees — individuals who would appear to not have much in common with each other, save for one trait: their Korean ancestry.
It is part of a photojournalism collection she calls The KYOPO Project, an ongoing endeavor in which she captures the portraits and stories of a cross-section of individuals of Korean descent who have spent the greater part of their lives in places such as the United States, Europe or South America.
The collection, which debuts as a photographic exhibit at the Korea Society in New York next spring, revolves around the term kyopo, which refers to individuals of Korean descent who grew up or live in a country outside the Korean peninsula.
“This project is way beyond the Korean factor. It hits different parallels of different types of struggles, especially those that other immigrants have had,” she said. “You deal with a spectrum of individuals of various demographic and socioeconomic levels.”
Hwang, a 33-year-old Korean American who grew up in Rockville, Md., a middle-class suburb of Washington, D.C., avoided using any specific criteria in selecting her participants. It was the organic process through which she found her subjects that lends the collection its sense of intimacy: all of those photographed are friends or acquaintances referred to her by previous participants, resulting in a heterogeneous sample of individuals unearthed largely through word of mouth.
What has resulted so far is a collection of individuals who vary from well-known figures such as author Chang-Rae Lee, actor Daniel Dae Kim and Ahn Trio violinist Angella Ahn to everyday figures including a nail salon owner, a university professor, a pop culture magazine editor, an architect and the first Korean American female fighter pilot to fly an Apache helicopter.
“They’re not hand-chosen, they’re not researched, I just kind of left the book open,” said Hwang, of her profile subjects, who range in age from five to 90.
“[The collection] remarks on such a nourishing message, which is being open-minded and accepting of every individual. A lot of people said ‘Yeah, I’m Korean, but it doesn’t define all of me.’”
Hwang continues to add to her collection of portraits, hoping eventually to turn it into a traveling multimedia exhibit with an accompanying Web site and book. She is currently in talks with the Asian Pacific American Program at The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., to set up an exhibit there next year.
A 1997 graduate in fashion design from the Fashion Institute of Technology, Hwang was exposed to photography at an early age. Her father, Sae Hwang, was a computer programmer and amateur photographer who moved his family to the United States from Korea when Cindy was 1.
She recalls a specific photo he took that still hangs in her family’s living room: an image of her mother and older brother walking along a beach, taken using a red filter on an Asahi Pentax camera he bought from Japan. “It’s the first thing I think of when I think of my dad and photography. He always had a passion for photography,” she said.
Following work as a fashion stylist and a stint in the editorial department at the now-defunct Mademoiselle magazine, Hwang began concentrating on photography in earnest about five years ago. She maintains a living by shooting portraits and advertisements for corporate campaigns.
Despite its clean, commercial look, no stylists are incorporated into The KYOPO Project. Instead, Hwang asks each of her profile subjects to come dressed as they wish to be seen in the photograph. Some have appeared on her doorstep in a T-shirt and jeans — others, in elaborate ball gowns.
In each portrait, the individual stands straight ahead, looks directly at the camera, and wears a neutral expression. Hwang deliberately chose the uniform composition so “the viewer can compare and contrast, visually, without any sense of interruption.”
For those who know Hwang, this open-ended approach reflects the artist herself. “It’s very consistent with who she is,” said close friend Shizuka Otake. “She’s the kind of person who doesn’t want to decide, ‘This is exactly what I want to portray.’”
The idea for The KYOPO Project first materialized in November 2004, when Hwang observed a lack of photographers addressing Korean culture and identity in a current context.
“I wanted to develop a book that explored contemporary issues, in this case duality of cultures and identities among a group of people that had Korean ancestry,” she said. “You have these interesting, varying relationships with language and culture whether it’s within the culture the [kyopos] reside in or the culture that they don’t.”
Hwang retains a near-photographic memory of all of her subjects, recalling facts about each of them in precise detail as she previewed the digital photos stored on her laptop during an interview.
Before snapping their photo, Hwang asks her subjects to respond to a series of questions relating to culture, self-identity and biographical information. Her subjects’ responses will appear as blocks of text next to their photos in the book, intended to highlight the diversity of the Korean diaspora.
“It’s about giving the audience their first impression without giving them all the answers,” she said of the photos-only exhibit.
For some participants, the greatest challenge was answering open-ended questions before the shoot, such as, “What does being Korean American mean to you?”
“It was something I never had to verbalize so completely before,” said Daniel Juhn, 42, a Korean American born and raised in New Orleans and who now works for a biodiversity conservation environmental organization in Washington, D.C. “What I had found was that as I started to put it down in words, the more insight it brought me, the more revelations it brought me, and the more difficult I found it to be.”
Hwang said she hopes the project will deliver inspiration to others, especially for younger generations still carving out their life path. “It’s constantly evolving, the definition of Korean American. Different facets of it have changed. If it helps incite other people’s interests, I think I’ve done part of my job here.”
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One of the the biggest Asian cinema events to hit Southern California opens on May 10. The Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, presented by Visual Communications, features the latest works by established and emerging filmmakers, along with seminars, panel discussions and symposiums on topics relevant to Asian Pacific cinema.
Opening Night features “Shanghai Calling,” directed by Daniel Hsia and starring Korean American Daniel Henney, who plays a Chinese American expat lawyer navigating his way through the mean streets of Shanghai (the picture above also indicates he is a raisin smuggler). But does he take off his shirt? Go watch the movie to find out! read more
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