Kyoungjae Cho presses the shutter only after constructing the scene to be photographed. Rather than seeking out and capturing a view before his eyes, he first builds a scene by stacking and erecting objects in real space. Arranged in this way, the objects shed their original function and form within the photograph, leaving only the shapes and colors of matter to combine with one another.

Cho graduated from the Department of Photography at Sangmyung University, completed his undergraduate and master’s studies at the Kunstakademie Münster in Germany, and went on to the Meisterschüler, the academy’s highest course of study. He has since developed a distinctive practice grounded in photography and extending into installation and performance. He has held solo exhibitions at SeMA Storage of the Seoul Museum of Art, Project Space SARUBIA, and Gallery Palzo, and has continued to exhibit in Germany, including in Berlin and Frankfurt. He received the Amado Photography Award in 2018 and has taken part in major residencies, including the MMCA Goyang Residency (2024).

His working method is singular. His photographs involve no digital compositing or retouching; they record, exactly as they stood, scenes he installed in real space, shot on a film camera. To this end, he gathers or fabricates objects and combines them, closely observing things and space while deciding forms moment by moment. Recently, he has brought his body into the work more directly, bending and twisting wire with the strength of his hands. What matters here is not the finished shape but the traces of force at work and the tension that arises as the material resists. When handling materials, he says, he values “process over form.”

Cho’s work changed course in 2023. Through collaboration with the performing arts, he grew interested in movement unfolding within space and in a sense of the communal. He is currently studying bodily states and movement with a number of performers. “I am interested in scenes where performers with different bodily conditions, emotions, and atmospheres meet, collide, and coexist within a single space,” he says.

At this year’s Kiaf, Kyoungjae Cho presents the IRON photographic series, made by bending iron by hand and photographing it; an installation of the same title that extends the series into space; and a video work unveiled for the first time. An iron installation stands at the center of the booth, with photographs including IRON 3 arranged around it. The video documents a performance of gathering the fragments of a collapsed world, dragging and pushing them into new relationships. The artist hopes viewers will come to feel that “connection is not a completed state but a process of continual making.” Moving among the photographs, installation, and video, the audience encounters the possibility of coexistence without perfect union.