From one NYC apartment, a vision of the Korean diaspora

Photographer Cindy Hwang. On the opposite page, selections from her Kyopo Project, photojournalistic portraits documenting individuals from the Korean diaspora.

By Nitasha Tiku

Cindy Hwang kneels down to pick up a photograph off the living room floor of her Gramercy Park one-bedroom. The glossy page is marked by a gray line down the center — on the left a full-length portrait of the Korean-American author Chang-Rae Lee, on the right quotes from Lee set into blocks of text. It is one of twenty such portraits of men and women, arranged in even rows of five on a crisp, white bed sheet that Hwang, has laid out on the wooden floor to display her work.

Chic and poised in a belted white top with bright yellow graffiti-like splashes, Hwang holds the page up to the sun-dappled wall to see it more clearly. “ ‘The Korea that I know is the Korea my parents brought over in 1968, which doesn’t exist anymore. Their sense of value, culture and self were hermetically sealed and brought with them in boxes,’ ” says Hwang, reading Lee’s words aloud. She takes a sharp breath, stifling a smile, “I think this applies to many individuals who came from different countries—you know, it just doesn’t exist anymore.”

Those 20 portraits, including Lee’s, are part of the Kyopo Project, a photojournalistic collection documenting individuals from the Korean diaspora. Kyopo is a Korean term that refers to people of Korean descent who live or grew up outside the peninsula. Hwang, who emigrated to the U.S. from South Korea with her family when she was just one-year old, began photographing subjects in 2004 and has amassed more than 160 portraits to date. Since all of the images were taken in her living room, they tend to focus on Korean-Americans who have some connection, if only in passing, to the city.

Along with a full-length photograph of each individual — wearing their street clothes and standing feet apart, staring unsmiling into the camera — participants were also asked how they saw themselves in terms of their Korean identity. Hwang culled from those responses and arranged the text beside the image.

Not all of their words are as evocative as Lee’s, an award-winning novelist. In fact, some observations are downright ordinary. But what Hwang provides is a multifarious look at the faces and experiences of being Korean-American: a Brooklyn musician who was adopted by a white family that knew little about his homeland, a practicing monk from Seoul who lives in Harlem, an Atlanta-born fashion intern with dyed-blonde hair who speaks fluent Korean.

For Hwang, who works under the pseudonym Cyjo (a combination of her Korean and American names), this is her most involved collection to date and a departure from previous work. She has dabbled in themed portraiture before with a series on female accordian players and Bollywood actors, but the Kyopo project is a much more personal endeavor, with the lens, this time, aimed at her own community.

Her collection will be on display at the Korea Society in Midtown next year. But Hwang’s hope is to take it on the road as a traveling exhibition, eventually publishing the series as a book. Over Labor Day weekend she received good news on that front: the Smithsonian Institution’s Asian Pacific American Program agreed to be a fiscal conduit for the project, including a possible stint at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C.

Hwang began this three-year odyssey with the desire “to show different perspectives — and fulfill a curiosity to see what other individuals were doing,” she says in a clipped, polished East Coast accent she gleaned growing up in suburban Rockville, Maryland, “It was wanting to understand who you are and if you’re any different from anyone else.”

Raised in a well-assimilated Korean household, Hwang didn’t return to Korea until she was 18-years-old. “I didn’t know much about my heritage. I was living this American life and I didn’t really see myself as Asian — that was my outer skin.” Hanging in her kitchen in Gramercy Park is a black-and-white photograph of her parents as a young couple in Korea. Her dad, sporting a po’ boy hat and a dark black glasses, has an Asahi Pentax camera hanging around his neck. After he passed away in 2000, Hwang, who majored in design at FIT, inherited his Pentax and took up photography more seriously.

Viewed en masse, the portraits from the project look stylized and sparse, calling to mind a minimalist fashion spread rather than a cultural critique. But in the guise of this unassuming presentation, Hwang subtly undermines the idea of an authentic or monolithic Korean identity through the diversity of experiences she presents.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee, a novelist, visiting lecturer at Brown University, and one of Hwang’s subjects, who penned the introduction to the collection was drawn to her project instinctively. “One of the interwoven threads is people having a lifelong journey of figuring out whether they’re more Korean or American,” said Lee, the author of Somebody’s Daughter, a novel based on her experience as a Fulbright Scholar taking oral histories of Korean birth mothers. The underlying fear for a kyopo, she said, is that they would be “alienated from ever achieving true Koreanness.”

Hwang insists that her project wasn’t about questioning authenticity. “In essence,” she says, “It’s a book about individuals who live outside their home country.” Indeed such a project could be done about the Indian or Chinese diaspora. But for Koreans living outside the peninsula, Hwang’s work is critical, said Lee, because there isn’t as established or vocal an expat community, particularly in the U.S., “Growing up in the Midwest, I was always a ‘Jap’ or a ‘Chink’. Even today Korea is not the foremost in everybody’s minds. It’s almost the country that someone’s forgotten.”

Lee sees Hwang’s project as an attempt to give voice to the kyopo community at large — and as individuals. “It’s like one of those Chuck Close paintings,” she says, “From far away it’s Van Gogh’s head, but up close each grid is something interesting.”

Donors interested in contributing tax-deductible financial support to the project can email: info@cyjophotography.com.