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Photographs and text by Cindy Hwang (CYJO)
Introduction by Julian Stallabrass
Foreword by Marie Myung-Ok Lee

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To order a copy of Kyopo, please use the link below:

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To download the press release, click here.

“The individuals are posed frontally, their eyes returning the camera’s and the viewer’s gaze, against the static backdrop of the photographer’s studio. Thus, each subject connects with and mirrors the others, while also reflecting their inherent differences and awareness of their simultaneous contemporary visions and experiences.” ~ Lenscratch

“CYJO’s images are wonderfully unencumbered: she focuses her lens on a straight-forward presentation of the physical and constructed “self.” Here we are, the images tell us, in our self-portrayals as contemporary Korean Americans.” ~ Amy Henderson, National Portrait Gallery

“CYJO’s message is clear: while the subjects share the same Korean ethnicity, each individual clearly represents, champions, shouts out a unique, intimate experience.” ~Terry Hong, Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program

“[T]he portraits in ‘Kyopo’ (a Korean term for an ethnic Korean who lives elsewhere) are each accompanied by short, first-person accounts reflecting on the nature of difference and assimilation…the pictures have the slickness of a fashion shoot, but the texts reveal hidden depth and complexity.” ~Michael O’Sullivan, The Washington Post

In modern, spare and elegant portraiture, artist Cindy Hwang (CYJO) highlights the diversity, identity and immigration of the global kyopo, those of Korean descent that reside outside of the Korean Peninsula, seven million strong. Mass emigration from Korea began in the mid-nineteenth century and accelerated during the Japanese colonial period, a time of foreign occupation that saw Koreans conscripted into forced labor. A second wave of emigrants fled beginning in the 1960’s, and it is these emigrants and their children that KYOPO captures as the face of the modern Korean diaspora.

Through her singular lens, CYJO seeks to unify these people and challenge the idea of the stereotypical Korean émigré. Yet perhaps a shared ancestry is the only thing that connects kyopo. CYJO decontextualizes her subjects to emphasize a sense of forced unity, allowing their spectrum of experience to contradict the apparent sameness of identity. Juxtaposed are the graduate student, the novelist, the human rights activist, the architect. The photographs, coupled with words from kyopo themselves, challenge the idea of a monolithic, “authentic” Korean identity, while stimulating exploration and a renewed perception of what it means to be both Korean and a citizen of the world.

CYJO is a Korean American who immigrated to the US in 1975, one of the 2.3 million Korean Americans here. CYJO’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C., T. Art Center, Beijing and The Korea Society, New York. Her work has been featured in numerous publications and broadcasts including A+A Magazine, ELLE Korea, Eloquence Magazine, Global Times, La Lettre De La Photographie, The New York Times, Vision Magazine, CBS News and PBS Sunday Arts News. She has lectured at the KACC, the 3rd Asian American Conference, The Korea Society, Miami University, The New York Life Company, NYU APA, Overseas Korean Foundation, and the Rubin Museum of Art.

Julian Stallabrass is a writer, curator, photographer and professor in Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Author of Art Incorporated, Internet Art, Paris Pictured, and Gargantua, Stallabrass writes regularly for publications including Tate, Art Monthly and the New Statesman and is a board member of Art History, New Left Review and Third Text. He curated the 2008 Brighton Photo Biennial, Memory of Fire: Images of War and the War of Images.

Marie Myung-OK Lee teaches at the Center for the Study of Race & Ethnicity in America at Brown University. Founder and former board president of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop,  she is the author of the novel Somebody’s Daughter. Essays and reporting have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic and Slate.

Hardcover / $75
13.5″ x 9″
498 pages / 237 full-color photographs
ISBN: 978-1-884167-90-4
August 2011