Korea opens first public museum for photography in Seoul

The Photography Seoul Museum of Art has opened its doors in Dobong District, northern Seoul, as Korea's first public institution devoted to the art and history of photography. Its inaugural group exhibition, "The Radiance: Beginnings of Korean Art Photography," provides a glimpse into its collection through five defining masters. Yonhap

Korea’s first public museum devoted to the art and history of photography opened its doors, Thursday, in northern Seoul.

While private institutions such as Museum Hanmi and the Goeun Museum of Photography have showcased the visual language of the lens since the early 2000s, the new Photography Seoul Museum of Art (Photo SeMA) in Dobong District is the first state-run institution dedicated solely to the exhibition, research, archiving and preservation of this ever-evolving medium.

With its black box-like form and twisting, curved edges, the structure rises four stories above ground and extends two levels below. Inside, it houses four exhibition halls, a photo library, a darkroom and two storage vaults — one for still images and the other for moving pictures.

The Photography Seoul Museum of Art / Courtesy of SeMA

“As a public institution, we aim to study, preserve and put on display both the history of Korean photography and its contemporary expressions with a long-term sense of purpose,” said museum director Han Jung-hee at a press conference held the day before the official opening.

“And because we’re able to offer our programs free of charge, we hope to invite more visitors to engage with and better understand the medium.”

The Photo SeMA will operate as a branch of SeMA, joining six other museums and art-focused spaces spread across the capital.

An untitled still life by Jung Hae-chang / Courtesy of SeMA

Over the past decade of preparation, the museum has amassed more than 20,000 works and archival materials spanning from the 1920s to the 1990s. Its inaugural group exhibition, “The Radiance: Beginnings of Korean Art Photography,” provides a glimpse into this collection through five defining masters.

The 157 analog gelatin silver prints on view are drawn from the works of Jung Hae-chang, Lee Hyung-rok, Lim Suk-je, Cho Hyun-du and Park Young-sook — artists who each shaped the visual and historical contours of photography in Korea.

Jung helped usher photography into the realm of fine art by staging Korea’s first solo show by a native artist in 1929. In his landscapes, still lifes, and portraits, he fused Western formalism with indigenous sensibilities, opening new aesthetic possibilities.

In the postwar years following the 1950-53 Korean War, Lee and Lim captured the shifting cityscape and the grit of working-class life through a realist lens.

Cho is regarded as a forerunner of modernist abstraction in Korean photography, while Park brought an incisive feminist edge to the medium.

Cho Hyun-du's "Lingering Snow" (1966) / Courtesy of SeMA

Alongside “The Radiance,” the Photo SeMA is concurrently hosting “Storage Story,” a contemporary exhibition of six artists who reimagine the museum’s architecture and archives through photography.

Particularly timely is Oh Joo-young’s exploration of AI-powered image restoration and storytelling. Drawing from the institution’s archives, Oh trains machine learning models to either transform historical snapshots into moving images, or act as critics, offering their own interpretations of the work’s meaning. In doing so, they navigate the shifting boundaries between past and present, human vision and machine perception.

Won Seoung-won's "Unfinished Architecture, Nature in Construction" (2025) / Courtesy of SeMA