The Seoul Issue
Aperture Magazine
No. 260, Fall 2025
No. 260, Fall 2025
Photography by Heeseung Chung
Image courtesy of Aperture
Aperture has released “The Seoul Issue,” a kaleidoscopic portrait of Seoul through the eyes of its extraordinary photographers. The latest entry in the magazine’s series of city-focused editions—following Accra, Delhi, Los Angeles, Mexico City, New York, Tokyo, and São Paulo—this issue brings together modern and contemporary image makers who embody the varied and flourishing photography scene of South Korea’s capital, a megacity now at the center of contemporary art and culture.
No. 260, Fall 2025
Photography by Yongjoon Choi
Image courtesy of Aperture
“The Seoul Issue” introduces some of Korea’s most influential photographers to an international audience. In an in-depth interview, Heinkuhn Oh discusses his uncanny portraits of teenagers, soldiers, and other social types who speak to collective and personal anxiety in Korean society. Aperture’s editor in chief, Michael Famighetti, profiles Bohnchang Koo, who obsessively collects and photographs moon jars, masks, figurines, and other talismanic objects, treating them as conduits to Korean history. Hyunji Nam catches up with Nikki S. Lee, who dropped out of New York’s art world and returned to Seoul after establishing herself as an enfant terrible in the 1990s with portraits of herself embedded in various subcultures. And critic Andrew Russeth celebrates the rich legacy of Space, Korea’s longest-running architecture magazine and a record of Seoul’s shape-shifting skyline.
No. 260, Fall 2025
Photography by Suntag Noh
Image courtesy of Aperture
No. 260, Fall 2025
Photography by Yezoi Hwang
Image courtesy of Aperture
Many of Seoul’s photographers grapple with the geopolitics and tensions of the past and the anxieties of the present, among them a cold war with North Korea and an ongoing crisis of democracy. While photojournalist Suntag Noh has spent decades depicting the region’s ideological rifts and contradictions with a dark absurdity, Yezoi Hwang hit the streets last winter, photographing large-scale protests that began when a now-impeached president declared martial law this past December. Yezoi Hwang imbues political subject matter with intimacy, as does the pathbreaking feminist photographer Youngsook Park, whose lyrical 1960s photographs are featured here.
Writer and curator Jaeyong Park contributes an essay on how a younger generation of photographers is exploring Seoul’s postmodern relationship to images, arguing that the city, through its profusion of screens that are “everywhere and nowhere,” has become a “prototype for a post-photographic future.” Cover artist Heeseung Chung grapples with this deluge of images by treating each of her eclectic, playful photographs as incomplete, steering us toward the mysterious gaps between pictures, whereas Chorong An’s recombinant photographs evoke life under the regime of K-beauty.
Weaving together multiple timelines and perspectives, “The Seoul Issue” is an essential resource for understanding how Korean photographers have mapped and continue to map the past, present, and future of a city defined by restless, dizzying transformation.
APERTURE
