"Last month we wrote that photography is, in the end, about keeping things. September's list asks what comes next. Who do we hand the kept things to, and how?"
In September, a photographer's darkroom becomes a museum. Six enlargers and the working tools Jerry Uelsmann used are crossing to Gimpo for an opening. Daegu traces a lineage from the roots of its local photo history to the artists working today, and Daejeon turns ten venues across the city into exhibition space for twelve days under a single word, "labor." Incheon is open for just seven days. This month the action is outside Seoul. We list the most urgent closings first.
Closing This Week
Na Hye-young, 〈Rastro〉
Nemo Gallery. 8.28 – 9.2.
It starts with the flamenco she first saw in the summer of 2015 at a small tablao in Granada, Spain. "Rastro" is Spanish for trace or track. She went after what is left behind once the dance ends. This Wednesday is the last day.
Alumni exhibition, Photography and Design graduate program, Hankyong National University, 〈Solidarity of Gazes〉 (시선연대)
Nodeul Gallery, Hall 1. 8.22 – 9.2.
A group show of alumni held together by one sentence: "We all look somewhere different." Some record the landscape closest to their lives, others look the opposite way. It closes the same day as Na Hye-young, so the two pair well on one trip through Seoul.
September in Gimpo
Opening of the Jerry Uelsmann Memorial Hall at Museum Hanmi Gimpo
Museum Hanmi Gimpo. Opens 9.11 (Fri).
The biggest news this month is a space, not an exhibition.
What Jerry Uelsmann (1934–2022) refined over a lifetime was combination printing. He loaded several negatives into several enlargers and exposed them one after another onto a single sheet of paper. It was the method Rejlander and Robinson used in the 19th century, and in the 1960s he brought it back and made it his own. Long before "compositing" became a digital word, he was making a surrealism that could only exist in the darkroom.
There is a reason to count the enlargers. Uelsmann's darkroom held seven of them, and he sometimes used more than ten at once to finish a single print. For him the number of enlargers was the working method itself, not a line on an equipment list. The memorial hall opening now will hold six enlargers he used in his lifetime, along with his tools and the fixtures of his studio and darkroom, moved and set up again. In other words, this is not a room with a few prints on the wall.
The museum says it will show his best-known works and archive through permanent and special exhibitions, and plans to run a darkroom program where visitors make analog prints themselves. More and more people shoot film, but where did any of them learn to print? A master's actual darkroom opening as a permanent hands-on space is closer to infrastructure than to an exhibition. In Gahyeon-ri, Gimpo, whose name means "beautiful hill," the hanok Gahyeonheon, a garden and the memorial hall sit together on top of a hill.
Details on how the darkroom program will run and how to book are expected around the opening.
〈Gimpo Jerry Uelsmann Memorial Hall Preview〉
Museum Hanmi Samcheong Annex. 5.22 – 9.30.
A preview show that has been running since spring, ahead of the Gimpo opening. Alongside Uelsmann's major works, it shows images he took himself in Andong and Jeju when he visited Korea, and works made by photographing pieces in the museum's collection. The design process for rebuilding his studio in Gimpo is on view too, with footage from the site.
From September 11 to 30, exactly twenty days, the Samcheong preview and the Gimpo hall overlap. If you want to see Uelsmann properly, this is the window.
September in Seoul
Cho Ui-hwan, 〈Willow Wind〉 (버들바람)
Hanbyeokwon Art Museum. 9.4 – 9.10.
The artist goes back with a camera to the willows of Gyeonggyo (京郊, the outskirts of the old capital) that Gyeomjae Jeong Seon painted three hundred years ago. The work sets up a camera where the paintings once stood. It opens on a Friday and closes the following Thursday. One week, exactly.
〈Museum B1: Next Stop, Roger Ballen〉 (미술관 B1: 다음 구역은 로저 발렌입니다)
Museum Hanmi Samcheong, main building B1. 9.1 – 9.30. Free.
Seven video works by Roger Ballen (1950– ), born in New York and based in Johannesburg, South Africa, since the 1970s, screen across the entire basement floor. They run from 〈I Fink U Freeky〉 (2012) to 〈Spirits and Spaces〉 (2026), made this year. It is a trailer for his solo show in October, timed to Kiaf and Frieze Seoul.
He has built landscapes of the unconscious with black-and-white film and staged studio sets, so it is all the more interesting that the video comes before the photographs. Visitors walk through the space as they watch.
〈Vogue Into Art〉
Museum Hanmi Samcheong, main building. 9.1 – 9.30. Free.
A show for the 30th anniversary of Vogue Korea. Thirty-three artists from Korea and abroad each took covers of 『Vogue』 from the past thirty years as a canvas, and the show hangs the 33 works they made. Some layer more than a hundred covers into a single image; others stack cut-up magazines into standing objects.
Koo Bohnchang is on the list of artists. It is a show about how printed matter turns back into art, so if you care about things made of paper, it is worth the visit.
Shin Sung-a 〈Imagination〉 · Choi Bang-won 〈Seasons in the Pupil〉 (눈동자 속의 계절)
Space Fourfour Gallery. 9.1 – 9.20.
An exchange show between Small Window Big Landscape (작은창큰풍경) and Space Fourfour. Two solo shows run side by side in one space.
Koo Bohnchang and Yeon Jin-young, 〈Bonyeon〉 (본연)
PS CENTER (3F, 18 Changgyeonggung-ro 5da-gil, Jung-gu, Seoul). 8.28 – 10.2. Free. Closed Sundays, Mondays and on Chuseok day.
"Bonyeon" sets the "Bon" of Koo Bohnchang beside the "Yeon" of Yeon Jin-young, and it is also a word for the origin of being, one's true nature. A photographer and a sculptor forty years apart in age dig into surface, materiality and layers of time, each in their own medium. One was born in 1953, the other in 1993.
Yeon Jin-young collects industrial materials that have lost their function, such as padding, airbags, ducts and tent fabric, takes them apart and sews them back together. The curators called this meeting "a new vanitas proposed by contemporary art."
RELATED · Feature Koo Bohnchang: Photographs That Hold On to What Disappears The photographer we wrote about in July now stands opposite a sculptor. We have a separate feature on his photographic world of bandages and thread, worn soap and Joseon white porcelain. → RELATED · Feature Martin Parr 〈We Are Martin Parr〉, at SeMA Museum of Photography through October 18 The retrospective that opened in July continues through September. Free. We covered the scale of the show and its main series in a separate feature. →September in Daegu
2026 Daegu Photo Biennale Special Exhibitions
Daegu Culture and Arts Center Art Museum, Galleries 6–12. 9.11 – 11.1.
There is no main biennale this year. The 11th edition is scheduled for October 2027, and Seok Jae-hyun, director of Artspace Lumos, was named artistic director last August. Three special exhibitions fill the gap.
〈Red Flags Become Stars: The Avant-Garde of Daegu Photography and After〉 (붉은 깃발 별이 되어) takes Galleries 6 to 10. The title is borrowed from a series by Yang Seong-cheol, a photographer who turned "red," long boxed in by politics and ideology, into a color of artistic passion and existential release. With that experimental spirit as its root, the show sets the work of four artists, Seo Jin-eun, Hong Jun-ho, Jang Yong-geun and Woo Chang-won, in one space. Until now the Daegu photo history series has been closer to an archive that collects and studies material. This time it puts that legacy head to head with the present.
〈DAC EP 2026: If We Can't Travel at the Speed of Light〉 (우리가 빛의 속도로 갈 수 없다면) is in Gallery 11. Four emerging artists chosen by open call, Park Ga-hyeon, Cho Woo-sung, Cho Hyun-sang and Tunari, each take on light and time, memory and matter, and the digital environment in their own way. Four separate orbits cross inside one show.
The third special exhibition, 〈Daegu Photography, Connecting Time〉 (대구 사진, 시간을 잇다), has only announced its title. Details are not up yet.
This is a city that has long called itself "the capital of photography," and here it takes on its own history directly. Chances like this are rare.
Piotr Zwierski, 〈SOLID MAZE〉
Artspace Lumos. 8.28 – 10.24.
A solo show by the Polish photographer has moved into the space where Lee Jae-gap's 〈Corners〉 (모서리) hung last month. It runs to the end of October, which makes it the most relaxed show in Daegu. Go after September 11 and you can see it the same day as the biennale special exhibitions. The man who runs this gallery is the artistic director of the 2027 biennale, so it is worth a stop as an early look at where Daegu photography is heading.
September in Daejeon
3rd Daejeon Photo Festival, 〈Labor〉 (노동)
Daejeon Artists' House (theme exhibition) and ten other venues across Daejeon. 9.9 (Wed) – 9.20 (Sun).
The theme is one word: labor. 108 artists from 10 countries take part, 16 of them in the theme exhibition alone. The opening ceremony is Saturday, September 12, at 4 p.m. in the third-floor courtyard of Daejeon Artists' House.
The program over those two days is what to watch. The public talk at 11 a.m. on the 12th covers "the Global South and labor," with a keynote by Nobuo Takamori. On Sunday the 13th there are two artist talks back to back: Yang Seung-woo's 〈Yakuza〉 at 2 p.m. and Lee Kyung-woo's 〈The World of Infrared〉 at 3 p.m. One is a photographer who spent years recording a yakuza community on black-and-white film; the other puts wavelengths the eye cannot see onto film. You can hear both in one afternoon.
One caution. Daejeon Gallery closes early, on September 17. Gallery Tan stays open until September 30.
September in Incheon
2026 Incheon International Contemporary Photography Exhibition, 〈Lucid Dream: The City's Right to Dream〉 (자각몽: 도시의 꿈꿀 권리)
Five venues in three areas of Incheon. 9.25 (Fri) – 10.1 (Thu). 10 a.m. – 6 p.m. Free. Organized by the Korea Institute of Visual Arts and Culture.
Manseok Pier, which still holds the memory of industrialization and the opening of the port; Guwol-dong, today's cultural center; and Songdo, which bills itself as the city of the future. The show ties the three into one story.
The center of gravity this time is Claude Cahun. With support from Jersey Heritage on the British island of Jersey, major works are coming to Incheon. Born in 1894 and dead in 1954, this French artist was already testing the boundaries of gender and self with her own face in the gelatin silver era. Self-portraits such as 〈I am in training, don't kiss me〉 (1927) only began to be read properly a hundred years later.
At the Incheon Culture and Arts Center in Guwol-dong, the Central Gallery hosts the international artists' exhibition and the Incheon Legends show (the late Kim Yong-su), while the Michuhol Gallery in the same building hosts 〈UNPAST: Terrains of Memory〉, a special exhibition organized by the Society of Contemporary Art Photography. Curated by Lee Pil, it includes 11 artists, among them Sung Neung-kyung, Lee Jae-gap, Byun Soon-cheol and Yoon Jeong-mee. The Incheon Global Campus in Songdo has Incheon artists, and the Croquet House at Manseok Pier has 26 artists from İFSAK in Türkiye.
Seven days. It opens Friday, September 25, and closes Thursday, October 1. The academic seminar and opening event are on the afternoon of Monday the 28th, in the main conference room of the Incheon Culture and Arts Center.
September in Andong
〈Magnum Between Pages 1943–2026〉
Andong Arts Center. 8.14 – 10.11.
Organized jointly by Andong Arts Center and Museum Hanmi, and curated by Museum Hanmi with Magnum Photos. It marks the 140th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Korea and France, and it is a reworked version of 〈Magnum in Photobooks〉 (포토북 속의 매그넘), shown at Museum Hanmi Samcheong last year.
Some 90 of Magnum's key photobooks and about 130 original prints are on view, but the real draw is next to them. Dummy books and plan sheets hang alongside the original prints. The show lays out the whole middle stage: the order in which a photographer's images are arranged, and how they are edited and designed into a single book. If you are thinking of making a photobook, this is your exhibition of the year.
Route Notes
In Seoul, the first week of September splits things. Nemo Gallery and Nodeul Gallery both close on September 2, and Hanbyeokwon Art Museum opens on the 4th and closes on the 10th. Museum Hanmi Samcheong opens two shows at once on the 1st. With the two main-building shows plus the Uelsmann preview at the Samcheong Annex, that is three in one cluster of buildings, and half a day is enough. Add PS CENTER (Jung-gu) and the day is full.
Gimpo is for after September 11. The Samcheong Annex preview closes on the 30th, so the best plan is to do Samcheong and Gimpo on the same day before then.
In Daegu, three special exhibitions open together on September 11. Add Lumos and it is a full day. They run until November 1, so there is no rush.
Daejeon is only twelve days, and Daejeon Gallery closes early on the 17th. If you are going for the artist talks, Sunday the 13th is the day.
Incheon is seven days. The venues are spread across three areas, so seeing everything in one day is hard. Do Guwol-dong first, and Songdo and Manseok Pier if you have time left.
Andong runs until October 11, so there is room. The show comes from the same curatorial team as Samcheong, so seeing Samcheong first and then going to Andong keeps the thread.
And this month you will meet Koo Bohnchang twice: at PS CENTER as one of two people facing a sculptor, and at Museum Hanmi as one of thirty-three. Seeing the same artist set at two very different scales is its own pleasure.
Look over the list again and this whole month is about ways of handing things on. How to move six enlargers across the Pacific, how to connect the roots of a local photo history to today's artists, how to bind many photographs into one book. September's list does not stop at keeping. It goes as far as putting things in the next person's hands.
