′living_R O O M‘ is the second part of the Global Art Project Trilogy ′world_S E Q U E N C E S.‘ What comes to mind when you think of a living room?
Perhaps a place that is deeply private, a space filled with personal memories, hidden stories, secrets, and meanings. It may not necessarily be a literal living room, but rather a place that feels like one: a space that reflects who you are, shapes your identity.
′living_R O O M’_ explores these intimate spaces and the personal worlds they contain.
The project has a unique feature: each participating artist is invited to bring along an artist with whom they have always wanted to collaborate. The resulting exhibitions bring the two artists together, creating a shared ′living R O O M‘ in which their artistic practices, perspectives, and personal worlds can meet, overlap, and enter into dialogue.
Participants:
These are the current participants. Simply click on the links to read about their projects and statements.
RAINER JUNGHANNS
XIANGJIE PENG invited JIANG JIAN
CHOI SANGSIK invited KIM YOUNGHOON
RALPH TEPEL invited KEI OGATA
XIAOJIAO YUAN invited SHENG JIN
YOUNGKWI CHOI invited MIHEE KIM
YAEKYUN LEE invited YEEUN LEE
Rainer Junghanns, Germany
Rainer Junghanns invited participating colleagues to ‘living _ R O O M’
Project: ‘living _ R O O M’. Between ‘what happens’ and your reaction to it, there is a room. This space of choice is a mindset characterized by unconditional acceptance and freedom.
I invite international photographers into my ‘living _ R O O M’, shaped by my travels, memories, and special places. Korea, China, and the international scene form the threads, intersections, encounters, and transformations.
Rainer Junghanns is an artist and curator based in Düsseldorf. His concept, “Space for Space”, develops artistic strategies that address the challenges of our changing times. He collaborates internationally with Global Art Projects, including as curator for the German-Japanese Museum Schloss Mitsuko, and in cooperation with the KP (Korea Photographers) Gallery in Seoul and the Hashi Gallery in Mexico City. As an artist, he has received numerous national and international awards, and his work has been featured in major exhibitions, most recently at the Busan International Photography Festival in 2025 and 2026 and the Jeju Art Biennale 2025/26 in Korea. He was also author and curator of the Japan Focus Project at NordArt 2025, the Busan International Photography Festivals in 2025 and 2026, and the Pingyao International Photography Festival in 2026.
Xiangjie Peng, China
Jiang Jian, China
Xiangjie Peng began practicing photography in 1990, focusing on documenting subcultures, non-mainstream communities, and conceptual photography. Has held roles including photographer at Document CHINA photo agency, academic and artistic advisor at Gucang Contemporary Image Gallery (Gucang Contemporary Art Institution), project coordinator for the Hou Dengke Documentary Photography Award, academic committee member of the Dali International Photography Festival, recommender for the Asian Pioneer Photographers Program (Dali International Photography Festival), and academic host for the Zhongnan Mountain Art Residency Project (Xi’an Original Image Gallery).
In Peng Xiangjie’s Catholic Friends, the living room is more than a domestic interior. It is a place where faith enters everyday life.
Photographed between 1995 and 2000 in Catholic villages in northwestern China, the series follows moments of prayer, Bible reading, visiting the sick, and belief passed quietly through family ties. A room used for eating, resting, and talking can also become a place of worship. A courtyard can become a gathering space. Private life and religious practice occupy the same ground.
Peng’s photographs are less concerned with religion as an abstract idea than with how belief is lived: through gestures, repetition, family relationships, and the ordinary spaces that hold them.
This is where the series meets living _ R O O M most directly. A family room can temporarily change its function when people gather inside it. It carries personal memory, but also the shared experience of a wider community.
These spaces are also changing. As younger generations leave rural villages for the city, both family structures and religious life begin to shift.
In Catholic Friends, the living room becomes a place where faith, family, memory, and social change overlap.
Why I Invited Jiang Jian and His Masters Series to Rainer Junghanns’ living _ R O O M
Jiang Jian photographed Masters in rural Henan during the 1990s, portraying farmers within the main rooms of their homes. In the context of rural China, these rooms function as the family’s living room, where people, furniture, household objects, and everyday belongings exist together within the same space.
These interiors are more than domestic settings. They also reflect a period of profound social change, preserving traces of rural life as China moved rapidly toward urbanisation.
I invited Jiang Jian to living _ R O O M because Masters brings a different domestic experience into the project: that of a non-Western agrarian society. Placed alongside works from other parts of the world, the series opens a broader conversation around home, identity, and belonging, while also asking: who is the “master” of the space we call home?
For me, it is important that these images are not read simply as exotic representations of rural China. I hope they can enter living _ R O O M as lived experience, participating equally in a global conversation about domestic space and social change.
Jiang Jian was born in Kaifeng, Henan Province, in 1953. He began working with photography in the 1980s after earlier experiences as an educated youth, electrician, and orchestral violist. His major series, including Scenes, Masters, Orphan Archives, and City Builders, use environmental portraiture and typological presentation to document the lives of ordinary people in China and the social transformations accompanying urbanisation. Since the 1990s, his work has been exhibited widely in China and internationally, including in the United States, Australia, and Europe, and has entered the collections of major museums and art institutions. Jiang has also worked extensively as a curator, jury member, and academic committee member for photography festivals including Pingyao, Lianzhou, Lishui, and Dali. He is currently Artistic Director of Time Space Gallery
Choi Sangsik, South Korea
Kim Younghoon, South Korea
Choi Sangsik is a Seoul–Daegu based photographer and exhibition curator with a background as a game developer and sound designer. He explores visual experience and the boundaries of reality, investigating personal and social issues through the lens of games and play.
Recently, he has also been working on projects that examine the connections between humans and the environment from a planetary perspective.
At some point, familiar places began to feel unfamiliar. The walls, furniture, and view outside the window remained unchanged, yet the way I perceived them had shifted. When someone I had lived with left, and when I stepped away from a profession I had remained in for many years, the meaning of the places I inhabited also began to change. As relationships disappeared and the positions and names that had long defined me gradually faded, familiar places no longer felt quite the same.
A place holds the time and relationships that have been lived within it. Objects, views, and empty spaces retain traces of what has passed. The same place can therefore appear entirely different depending on the memories and experiences through which it is perceived. I am interested in this shift. In the sensation of remaining within a familiar place while gradually feeling distanced from it, of being inside and yet somehow standing outside.
It may emerge from a change in a relationship, a turning point in one’s life, or the quiet sensation that follows when the things that once defined us begin to disappear.
The work begins by looking again at places where one has spent a long time. The place remains unchanged, yet when the person looking at it has changed, a familiar space begins to acquire a new meaning. I look at the subtle shifts between people and places from within that threshold. What remains inside while existing outside, what has not left yet is no longer what it once was. I encounter the spaces and people left between these states.
I recommended Kim Younghoon because I thought his photographic work connects well with the spirit of living _ R O O M.
Kim Younghoon has been working for many years with personal spaces, objects, light, and traces of everyday life, exploring memory, absence, and the passage of time.
I feel that his way of looking at spaces where someone has lived has a subjective, yet delicate and warm perspective.
In addition, he runs an alternative art space, Moho House, in Daegu, where he has been actively discovering artists and creating connections between artists and their work.
I thought that his artistic approach and these activities could bring an interesting perspective to the project, which is why I recommended him.
Born 1986
B.F.A., Department of Photography & Video Design, College of Fine Arts, Keimyung University
Solo Exhibitions
2026 Aechak-sajin (Attachment Photographs) Exhibition (Alternative Space Mohohouse)
2018 ′I Stood Quietly, Forgiving (2018) Exhibition‘ (Alternative Space Noon, Suwon)
2017 ′Observer Notes (2017) Exhibition‘ (Gaga Gallery, Insa-dong)
Group Exhibitions
2025 ′Rising Island‘ Exhibition (four-artist exhibition / Atrium Mori Art Museum, Seongju, Gyeongbuk)
2023 ′Art of Our Neighbors‘ Exhibition (Alternative Space Mohohouse opening exhibition, Daegu)
2018 ′An Ordinary Gaze Exhibition‘ (six-artist exhibition / Sian Museum of Art, Yeongcheon, Gyeongbuk)
2016 ′Urban Railway Project 2016 Art Train <Daegu — Time of Circulation> Exhibition‘ (Line 3, Daegu)
2013 ′Future Colors of Daegu‘ Exhibition (six-artist exhibition / Bongsan Culture Center, Daegu)
2012 ′2012 ASYAAF‘ (Culture Station Seoul 284, Seoul)
Ralph Tepel, Germany
Kei Ogata, Japan
Ralph Tepel (b. Germany) is an artist and photographer who studied art, design, theology and philosophy. He has worked as a professional artist and photographer since 1986, beginning with street photography and concert and ensemble photography.
From 1997 to 2006 he taught graphics, artwork, design and typography in Troisdorf, Cologne and Berlin. He was a member of the American Society of Picture Professionals (ASPP) from 2005 to 2019. In 2005 he was invited to Art Addiction, the first online art gallery (founded by Petru Russo in 1992), and was nominated for an award there. Since 2015 he has been an artist of Galerie Dr. Jochim.
His work has been shown internationally. At the invitation of Rainer Junghanns, he took part in Undress Me My Little Buddha in Paris. He was also part of the Summer Time exhibition at the Busan International Photography Festival (BIPF) 2025 in South Korea, and at BIPF 2026 and the Pingyao International Photography Festival (PIP) in China.
He is the director of the German Museum for Japan and contemporary art ‘Schloss Mitsuko’ since 2018.
The living room is where a life comes together: family, memory, warmth. Kei Ogata’s three-year documentation of the Tōhoku earthquake and Ralph Tepel’s photographs of Coal Miners Land in Kananaskis, Canada, show two ways of losing such a space: suddenly through nature, or slowly through over 100 years of open-pit mining that gave people work and energy but changed the land. Living Room does not stay with the loss. It asks what grows afterwards.
I am inviting Kei Ogata because his photography already moves through the territory this project wants to open: places that have been emptied, silenced or become uninhabitable, and the people who carry them within. With him, the LivingRoom can speak about displacement and loss and stages of intermediate regaining and starting anew from a position of lived, patient, long-term engagement, and not only from a distance.
Ogata returned to the affected regions again and again over three years. His images show people who come back, live in intermediate homes, rebuild, or find a new home elsewhere. Hope appears here as perseverance.
Tepel’s Kananaskis is a landscape of scars, yet nature is reclaiming it piece by piece. Hope appears here as regeneration. For Tepel the place also carries a personal story: part of his family found a new home in Canada.
A new home does not replace the old one. It grows from what people carry with them: objects, stories, habits, names. Hope is not consolation but action: rebuilding, returning, planting, remembering, passing on.
Core Question Where does the hope come from to create a new home after loss, and what do we take with us to do so?
Xiaojiao Yuan, China
Sheng Jin, China
Yuan Xiaojiao, born in 1992, began her artistic practice in 2023, based in Shenzhen, China. To her, photography is a mirror of life. There is no need to search deliberately; when you press the shutter, what emerges is yourself. She prefers to explore the self through shadows and build dreamscapes with them. In her work, there is no fixed destination to reach, nor any lengthy explanation of meaning. These nebulous images hold her attitude toward existence: when the world tries to print a standard “instruction manual for life” with concrete and steel, we may stretch freely like shadows, unbound by logic. It serves only to affirm: to live is itself an improvisational performance where we can be fully free. She holds a Master’s degree in Social Work; her works have been presented in solo and group exhibitions worldwide, and are licensed by Artron for art‑market circulation.
Run, run, run. I race through grasses taller than my head, cross the river, and my old home comes into sight.It is only a dream.I return to the old home under clear skies and warm wind. Everything and everyone stay unchanged. I feel relieved, as if I have weathered a storm and all I cherish remains intact. I wake to a dream within a dream, tears streaming down my neck and seeping into my skin. For many, the living room is a tangible place one can revisit years later. For me, the homes that shaped my growth have dissolved forever, leaving irreparable voids.I was once like an injured bird, hoping to return to my nest after healing. Wandering onward, I faced storms and hostility, yet also received kindness. I gradually realise I could never truly go back, even if the nest still existed. I stop seeking an external permanent haven, and build my inner living room amid endless wandering.
I know spaces fade as life shifts. Tension stays within me: I rationally accept change and adapt, yet the symbol of the living room stirs deep emotion. Warm memories mingle with regret for separation. Weary of constant farewells, I hold onto the past yet must move forward.Physical spaces perish, but memories endure. Those vanished living rooms become my spiritual homeland. Their warmth, ordinariness, and hard‑won insights from loss root me and shape who I am. Perhaps the living room is only a symbol for my tangled feelings around intimacy. I once dreamed it would stand still, waiting for me. Whether it exists physically or not, my experiences have transformed my perspective. These complex emotions finally settle in the living room I build within myself.
I invite Jin Sheng to join living_ROOM. Documenting makeshift shelters scattered across the city with an equal gaze, he offers a fresh interpretation: a living‑room is not limited to solid, enclosed architecture. Any space that settles the mind and sustains everyday life can serve as one. For his subjects, these sites signal the close of one life chapter and the start of another. Guided by restrained observational ethics, his work bears witness to alternative realities without probing, intervening or intruding. Rarely regarded as homes, these spaces stem from contrasting circumstances. Some choose to escape conventional housing, while others are displaced. Their circumstances defy simple judgement. The works reveal innate human resilience: people forge their own places to dwell when formal housing is unavailable.His insight into fluid habitation resonates with my own story. My memory‑laden physical living‑room is gone. Endless drifting has made me a spiritual wanderer who must find inner ground to settle. Though our experiences differ, his subjects building lives amid impermanence bring us to the same realisation: home does not rely on walls. Setting aside moral judgement, he records unadorned existence within instability and brings overlooked marginal spaces into public view, broadening the project’s scope.An artist and my husband, he is generous and perceptive. Through my periods of displacement, he has been my practical and spiritual anchor. Rooted in mutual respect and calm, we sustain a spiritual living‑room shared only by us. United by our understanding of habitation and spiritual belonging, my vanished past enters dialogue with the transient spaces in his work. Together we articulate the project’s essence: the true Living_ROOM transcends physical walls. It is a spiritual homeland where the self can reside amid life’s constant shifts.
Jin Sheng, born in 1991, is based in Shenzhen, China. He commenced his photographic practice in 2017. Holding a Master’s degree in Design, he works as a designer, independent photographer and performer. He is the founder of Banana Photography Studio (Chongqing). Drawing from his cross‑disciplinary background spanning visual design and performance, his practice centres on photographic observation of reality. Jin Sheng’s photography captures the present, fleeting moments and coincidences. Driven by curiosity, he walks outward and encounters the diversity of the world. Photography serves as his primary medium to engage with and interpret the world. He is fascinated by structures, figures, colour, light and shadow. When these elements converge, they form the ideal images he seeks. The camera functions like a suit of armour; with it, he embarks on countless unknown adventures.
Youngkwi Choi, South Korea
Mihee Kim, South Korea
Choi Youngkwi graduated from the Department of Photography and Video at Chung-Ang University and majored in photographic design at Hongik University’s Graduate School of Industrial Art.
It has been said that only those who have experienced loss can truly understand it. After my husband’s sudden death, I found myself confronting the unraveling of family and home. In this unprepared solitude, my camera became a ray of light in my anguish—the one instrument I could rely on and my only companion. At times, heartbroken, I retreated beneath the dining table; at others, I wandered aimlessly through the forest, disoriented and detached from myself. I built a mountain of salt as heavy as my body, then lay within its suffocating enclosure. These gestures emerge from an unbearable reality in which absence has transformed existence itself. In a world severed from what was, they become a voiceless outcry—an attempt to confront pain and find a way forward.
The reason why I invite Mihee Kim
What I find particularly intriguing in Mihee Kim’s work is her approach to indirectly revealing herself through fragments of her body and everyday objects, guided by the idea of “My Unexpressed Colors.” She looks at familiar things from an unfamiliar perspective, using ambiguity and blurred imagery to resist defining her inner world through a single, fixed image. Particularly compelling is her willingness to view herself as the Other, opening up new possibilities for the construction of identity. Through the encounter between our two practices, I hope to explore how the worlds we each perceive and the ways we express them might influence one another. When images emerging from different experiences and sensibilities meet, they can generate new meanings that may not have been visible within either practice on its own. This collaboration, therefore, will go beyond simply combining our works. It will offer an opportunity to see our own work anew through another’s gaze, and to rediscover the sensibilities and meanings embedded within it.
Mihee Kim (b. 1973, Incheon, South Korea)
Mihee Kim studied English and Chinese literature and has worked in English language education and Chinese literary studies. Alongside her professional pursuits, she has developed an independent photographic practice, contributing images to various publications and classical music album covers. Deeply engaged with the humanities and philosophy, her work explores inner expression, absence, and the quiet affirmation of existence. Through still-life photography, she approaches the overlooked objects of everyday life as others, discovering in them subtle traces of presence and absence. Working under the name Outis—Greek for “no one”—she seeks to embrace the multiplicity of things through an anonymous gaze, finding in the vanishing days of ordinary life a quiet way of contemplating existence.
Jaekyun Lee, South Korea
Yeeun Lee, South Korea
Jaekyun Lee closely observes things that are “Disvisual” such as faded histories, what has been concealed by power, and paradoxes that individuals pass by without noticing. Through photography, he explores how these elements operate within the human interior and within social structures.
Born 1995 – Based in Busan, Korea
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2026 23rd SAJINBIPYONG AWARD-CREATIVE PRIZE (Photography), Space Poolsoop, Seoul, Korea
2025 “Residual Heat: Heat and Membrane,” Look Inside Gallery, Seoul
2025 Busan International Photo Festival, International Young Artists Exchange Exhibition, “Under the Skin: Heat and Membrane,” Ilsan-Suji, Busan
2025 23rd DongGang International Photo Festival, Street Installation Exhibition, “Yeongwol Jigi,” Yeongwol area, Yeongwol
2024 Busan Museum of Art Special Exhibition „LOVE AND PEACE: PIECE PIXELS“, Domohun, Busan
2024 24th Pingyao International Photo Festival „N in the Laboratory“, Shaanxi, China
2024 „The sea named Us“, Kyungpook National University Art Museum, Daegu, Korea
2023 “Texture of Flat”, Art District_P, Busan, Korea
2023 Ulsan Art Museum Face to face Project “Turn of Center”, Total Museum, Seoul, Korea
2023 BIPF portfolio review winner’s exhibition “The Silver Linings”, curator’s atelier49, Seoul,
Korea2022 Donggang International Photo Festival International Open Call Exhibition “Eureka! An Emerging Revelation”, Yeongwol, Korea
2022 “Chania International Photo festival”, Blank Wall Gallery, Chania, Greece
2022 Ulsan Art Museum Opening Exhibition “Face to Face 2021” Ulsan Art museum, Ulsan, Korea
2021 “Start-Line”, Shinsegae Gaellery, Busan, Korea
2021 Daegu Photo Biennale : Photography Department Exhibition, Daegu art factory, Daegu, Korea
SOLO EXHIBITION
2025 “X,” Ilsan-Suji, Busan, Korea
2023 “Image Craft : Dismantling ”, France Artspace, Busan, Korea
2023 “Newspace spectacles”, Hongti Art Center, Busan, Korea
2021 “The weak landscapehides a grotesque beast”, Gallery Sujeong, Busan, Korea
2020 “S.O.S : Social Organizatium System”, Seoriful Gallery, Seoul, Korea
Little by little, the image is detaching from its nexus. Places fragment into indiscriminate source material, while the document swells behind a saccharine narrative. An exhaustive collection of scattered memories. Decoding the images of the past after so much time has slipped by is far from easy, yet the instant narrative piercing through these images feels almost too sweet, too clean. Between Calmness and Passion is a culmination of wandering thoughts I captured a decade ago, right on the threshold of adulthood, armed with a roll of Agfa Vista 400 and a compact camera whose flash fired on a whim. Back then, I longed for a cinematic life, keeping records while measuring out the moments I was given. But as the years passed, the continuity of these images dissolved, eventually breaking away from their original nexus entirely. Re-weaving that scattered time is the process of realigning the raw documents that have been expanding in the shadows where the original narrative evaporated. Uncovering my deeply hidden private realm, I had once hoped to craft something akin to a compelling film, but the narrative revealed by photography is nothing more than an image of distorted traces. The unresolved nature of time, its distinct discontinuity, is almost a relief. This work might have started as a record to prove who I once was, but ultimately, it becomes a piece that proves the very impossibility of such proof.
Why I invited Yeeun Lee: We first met in the winter four years ago. Her work, which finds stability within things that appear fragile, closely resembled the person I saw in her. What is it that she is truly pursuing in life? When I saw her recent solo exhibition, it felt just as precarious, perhaps even more so. To connect with people, she revealed her inner self carefully, yet precariously. Her imagery is continuous. As soon as I received the proposal for ‚living _ R O O M‘, I knew I wanted to work with her. Since she brings a different energy from me, who deals with discontinuous images of the past in this project, I thought that perhaps we might be able to observe each other from a distance.
Yeeun Lee Born 1994 in Seoul, Korea, lives and works in Icheon, Korea
[Education]
2026 M.F.A. Fine Art Photography, Dept. of Fine Arts, Chung-Ang University Graduate School
2019 B.F.A. Photography, Video & Media, Sangmyung University College of Art
[Solo Exhibitions]
2023 Move the Mountain, Mustard Seed, The Reference, Seoul, Korea
2022 227 people, Goeun Museum of photography BMW Photo Space, Busan, Korea
[Group Exhibitions]
2026 Come Back Home, Seoul Museum of Photography, Seoul, Korea 2025 Again Democracy, National Museum of Democracy and Human Rights, Seoul, Korea
2025 THE SHOW MUST GO ON : CANADA, Korean Cultural Centre Canada, Ottawa, Canada
2024 Anxieties, when Shared, Space*c, Seoul, Korea
2024 House on Fire, Esther Schipper, Seoul, Korea
2021 Actually, The dead are not dead, Totalmuseum, Seoul&Anseong, Korea
2021 Breathing Wals, Embassy of Switzerland in the Republic of Korea, Seoul, Korea
2021 Respect Plant, Seoul Museum of Art SeMA Storage, Seoul, Korea
2021 Visvble Voices, LAZNIA Centre for Contemporary Art, Gdańsk, Republic of Poland
2021 Encounter VI, The 8th Daegu Photo Biennale, Dongdaegu Station Plaza, Daegu, Korea
2018 17th DongGang Internnational Photo Festival, Yeongwol, Korea
[Awards and Residencies]
2018 The 7th Daegu Photo Biennale: Outstanding Artist (Portfolio Review) [Public Collections] Goeun Museum of Photography, Ami Art Museum, Embassy of Switzerland in the Republic of Korea
Xinglei Lee, China
Weiren Zhang, China
Born 1991, independent photographer
His practice long‑term centres on individual solitude and existential reflection. His works merge austere rationality with poetic sensibility. Leica Invited Artist, collaborating on the original art short film Untying · Black‑and‑White Dream Trap, 2026. His works are permanently published and featured on Leica’s official website. He has shot portraits for actress Zhou Xun, and photographed the opening cover for fashion magazine T Magazine.
Publications
2024 Tides, photobook, published by AKAAKA, Japan
Solo Exhibitions
2024 The Map of Tides, Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Xiamen
2023 Golden Slumber, Taogu Park, Nanjing
2022 Secrets Bloom, LowLowland, Guangzhou
2020 Gravity and Light, OrigiNature, Chengdu
2019 We Are All Trapped in Time, Taogu Park, Nanjing
2019 Mandala, Huayingxiong, Hangzhou
Selected Group Exhibitions
2026 Tide‑Space‑Time, Busan International Photo Festival, Busan, South Koreabipf.kr
2026 World_SEQUENCES, Global Art Project, Deutsch‑Japanisches Museum, Germany
2026 Sa patience de supporter une âme, Paris, France
2025 Lightning, Butterfly, Flame, Cocoon, Wander, Sword, Nanjing University of the Arts Art Museum, Nanjing
2024 Re‑Light: Writing with Photography, Shanghai
2024 Tides, PHOTOFAIRS SHANGHAI, Shanghai
2023 Ripples: Folds of Time, four‑artist exhibition, Chongqing
2019 Daydream, Asia NOW Paris Art Fair, Paris, France
2019 What Only My Eyes Can See, Special edition Project, Shanghai 2016 Heterozygous Symbiosis‑Cross‑Strait Young Photographers Exhibition, Suojian Gallery, Beijing
2015 Jinan International Photography Biennial Academic Exhibition, Jinan 2015 Charity Exhibition for Chinese Autistic Children, Beijing 2014 Observation‑Exhibition of 20 Young Asian Photographers, China Millennium Monument, Beijing
Awards
2026 Nominated Photographer, Exposure One Awards
2024 Gold Award, Human‑Documentary Category, Fujifilm 90th Anniversary Global Photography Competition
2015 TOP20 Chinese Contemporary Photographer Award
2014 Fotomen Emerging Photographer Award
2014 Best Emerging Artist, 5th Jinan International Photography Biennial
Collections
His representative series Tides is held in permanent collections by multiple international private collectors and institutions. His works are widely collected across Europe and Asia.
Solitude is not about space, but a state of being: the underlayer of the soul after the social mask falls away.
The room lies at the junction of day and night, the threshold between wakefulness and dream. Light filters through window frames and falls upon skin; time drifts slowly between sofa and bed. Here, one contemplates, withdraws, unfolds and rests, chanting in silence.
Within this black-and-white greyscale, life sheds its colourful illusions and reveals its raw undertone. This solitude is the truest baring of the self.
Why I invited Weiren Zhang: For the global project ‘living _ ROOM’ , TAIGA offers a powerfully wild, Eastern re-interpretation of what a ‘living _ ROOM’ can be.
To most, a living room is an enclosed, private indoor space. Yet rooted in his personal experience, the taiga deep in the Lesser Khingan Mountains serves as his living room. Remote and isolated, life here is intertwined with the forest: climbing trees was childhood play, snowfields were roads to travel, and days shaped by logging and snowstorms forged a quiet, resilient character.
Zhang Weiren’s photography breaks free from conventional portraiture. Headless garments, glowing figures in open wilderness, bodies hidden among treetops — the self dissolves into the vast surroundings. Bodies are sometimes absent, sometimes concealed within plants and earth. His work probes: what constitutes private territory? Where lies the boundary of home? When human life takes root in the wilderness, nature becomes a vessel for inner emotion, childhood memory and the legacy of survival.
With near-surreal, cool-toned imagery, he redefines the “intimate dwelling” as wilderness itself — offering an irreplaceable, outward-inward answer for Living Room.
Weiren Zhang was born in 1994 and graduated from China University of Mining and Technology with a degree in Electrical Engineering. He currently lives and works in Chengdu as a freelance photographer and engineer. His works have been exhibited at photography festivals in Chengdu, Ningbo, Xishuangbanna, Lishui, Busan, and other places. They have also been published in magazines and newspapers such as Popular Photography, Southern People Weekly, and China Daily.
Main Awards
—The Shortlisted in Bartur Photo Award 2021
—The Highly Commended in Belfast Photo Award 2023
—The Excellent Exhibition Award in Xishuangbanna International Photo Festival 2023
Li Wei, China
Shansheng Cui, China
Li Wei is a photographer and filmmaker. He was born in 1976 in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, China, and graduated from the Communication University of China in 2001. His work focuses on China’s border regions, such as Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet, and on the cultural changes taking place there. His photographs have been shown at the China Pingyao Photography Festival, the Angkor Photography Festival, the Singapore International Photography Festival, and the Busan Photo Festival. In 2016, he completed his first documentary film, HEXIGTEN. He lives in Beijing, China.
When I think about living_ROOM, I think of the interiors of people’s homes in China, especially those I photographed in the country’s border regions. Some live in permanent structures or brick houses, others in yurts. These different forms of dwelling are my starting point for a photographic exploration of interior space and the many ways people inhabit it.
I’m interested not only in architecture itself, but also in how people shape, use, and give meaning to their spaces. What traces do their ways of life leave behind? How do cultural traditions, personal habits, and everyday needs show up in the arrangement of objects and the organization of domestic space?
I invited Cui Shansheng, whom I have known for several years. We have taken part in photography festivals and photobook exhibitions together. He is also a poet, and you can feel that in his photographs, which are full of poetic sensibility. In recent years, his work has won several awards.
Cui Shansheng, born in 1991, is a poet and photographer. His work draws on literature, cinema, and popular culture and looks at how capitalism shapes the world and the individual, as well as the fissures and resonances between the individual and their time. His major photo series include City Phantom, Murder in the City, Northern Theater, Variations of Island, and Rusty Memory.
Awards and Residencies
2023 PIP „Kunpeng Award“ winner.
His work has been included in the AAA Asian Documentary Art Archive and the work Northern Theater was selected for the 2023 Chinese Contemporary Imaging 100 Artists Yearbook.
Solo Exhibitions
2023,“Echo Chamber“, Society Gallery(Harmony Art), Shanghai; „Nomadic Ship“, Photism, Chengdu;
2022 , „Tokyo Phantom“, Photism, Chengdu
Group Exhibitions
2026, 100 Islands, Zhoushan Art Museum, Zhoushang;
2025, The 2nd Global Youth Visual Arts 100, China Millennium Monument, Beijing; SHANGHAI FotoFairs, Shanghai Exhibition Center, Shanghai; “Dreamscape: Spring Collection“, Fuxian Zone, Ningbo;
2024, „Street and River“, Shanghai Photography Festival, Shanghai International Fashion Center,Shanghai;
2023,“Synthetic Ecology“, Chengdu Biennale of Photography, Chengdu Art Museum; „The Pulse of the Foreign Land“, Rongyi Art Museum, Shanghai; „Chinese Youth Photography Promotion Program:, Diesel Plant C3 Hall, Pingyao; „Fusion: The Reinvention of Oriental Philosophy in Photography“, Lishui Photography Festival, Building 17, Lishui;
Jincheol Lee, South Korea
Jincheol Lee is a Korean photographer working with both conventional photography and alternative photographic processes, including gum printing and cyanotype. His practice explores personal experience, memory, and the traces of time, with particular attention to the physical and material qualities of the photographic image. He held his first solo exhibition, INITIO, in 2025 and has participated in a number of group exhibitions, including Unscanned (2025) and Homo Memoricus (2026). He also participated in the Cheongju International Art Fair in 2025 and the Imago Blueprinting group exhibition in 2026.
My father has a bedroom, but he lives in the living room. He spends most of his day there. He sleeps, eats, rests, and passes his time in this space. What was once a shared room for the whole family has gradually become his most private living space. Even within a single home, a space can take on different meanings depending on the person who inhabits it. A room is not defined only by walls and doors. The places where we repeatedly stay, the objects within our reach, the paths our bodies become accustomed to, and the habits accumulated over time create invisible territories of our own.
Three generations of my family live together under one roof: my father and mother, myself, and my third son. Each of us has our own routines and our own space. My father’s territory, however, is no longer contained within a single room. As his daily life has moved into the living room, the boundary between a shared family space and one person’s private space has gradually blurred. For me, the living room is no longer simply a place shared by the family. The more time my father spends there, the more it has slowly become his room. We still share the same living room, but it now holds a time and a life that belong uniquely to him.
Solji Jeon, South Korea
Working primarily with photography, Solji Jeon explores transformations that emerge through time, materiality, and perception. Through subtle elements such as airborne particles, dust accumulating on surfaces, and traces formed by the passage of time, her work investigates invisible movements and processes of change.
Education
Kaywon University
Group Exhibitions
Between Space, Space Aesthetics, Pyeongtaek, Korea, 2026
Echoes and Heat Haze, Gyeonggi Creation Center, Ansan, Korea, 2026
Layer > New > Layer, YArt Gallery, Seoul, Korea, 2026
Collection
Gyeonggi Cultural Foundation, 2025
Award& Selection
Portfolio Selected, Busan International Photo Festival, 2026
Gyeonggi Young Artist <New Blood>, Gyeonggi Cultural Foundation, 2025
At 7 in the morning, light comes through the curtains and forms a triangle in the room. It’s a perfect triangle, visible only for a moment. I look at the same scene every day. The room seems to move on its own. Even when I do nothing, light comes in, shadows shift, and the scene changes little by little over time.
A room can hold a sense of stability—with time settling into it day after day. To have my own space means having a place where my existence can remain. We give names to spaces, assign them purposes, and leave traces in them.
The moment a person leaves, those names and purposes return to something without a name. But even in places that seem empty, many things continue to move slowly. The room no longer remains fixed to a single purpose, but becomes a place where other beings stay and pass through.
Can a room with no one in it still be a „living room“? A living room is a space where rooms meet, where different forms of life briefly overlap.
Perhaps a room isn’t fixed to one name and use, but is always becoming a different kind of space, even as the movements of other beings overlap within it. For me, a living room isn’t a fixed place, but a space that keeps changing and is only briefly complete—like the triangle that appears and disappears in the room each morning.
Hyunjin Park, South Korea
Hyunjin Park works primarily with photography and is a educator whose practice explores the diverse ways different bodies sense, experience, and encounter the world. Working with photography as a means of connection, she engages with various forms of life and accompanies them as they discover and express the world at their own pace. Her practice considers how relationships with others can unfold through photography, and how, through these encounters, we might slowly learn to understand and live with difference.
Solo Exhibition
2025 감각 tran-sense-lation 횡단, Factory2, Seoul, KR
Group Exhibitions
2026 Look Inside New Wave 2025, Look Inside Gallery, Seoul, KR
2025 Arko Day:The Long Tail, Arko Museum Open Space, Seoul, KR
2024 Mit Fremden Augen, Goethe-Institut Korea, Seoul, KR
2024 Non-Stage Zone: Revealing, Crossing, and Reversing, Forever Gallery, Seoul, KR
2023 PlanT House, Hongcheon Art Museum, Hongcheon, KR
2023 Our Mind Gardening, Gallery IN, Seoul, KR
2023 Traversing X Networking, Capital Art Center, Taipei, TW
2022 UNTER DEN NÄGELN, Thüringer Landtag, Erfurt, DE
Awards & Grants
2026 Best portfolio, Busan International Photo Festival, KR
2026 Art Support Program, Gyeonggi Cultural Foundation, KR
2025 Art Support Program, Korea Disability Arts & Culture Center, KR
2025 Art Support Program, Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture, KR
2025 Art Support Program, Arts Council Korea, KR
2024 The 1st K-Youth Photography and Video Festival, The Society of Modern Photography and video, KR
2023 Emerging Artist Growth Support Platform _ Hwawon (畵院), Total Museum, KR
One day, in the midst of a busy life, I found myself at home yet thinking, “I want to go home.” As the periods in which I could not properly rest grew longer, even breathing comfortably began to feel difficult. This was not only my experience, but also something I recognized in friends and others living through similarly busy lives.
In Korean, the words for “to breathe” (숨을 쉬다) and “to hide” (숨다) share the same word, sum, meaning breath. This linguistic connection led me to think about the relationship between breathing and rest. When I ask myself when I breathed most freely, I remember hiding in different corners of my childhood home. The small spaces where I could hide from others were places where my mind could rest.
A hiding place is not simply somewhere to conceal the body. It can be a space to temporarily distance oneself from the world, to breathe, and to return to oneself. I began to think that hiding could also be a form of resting, and that breathing freely might mean being able to rest freely.
For this series, I asked people to choose a space where they felt most at ease and to hide there for a certain amount of time. I photographed them from a distance, careful not to disturb their rest.
The figures in these photographs do not exist to be found. They hide for a moment in their own spaces, breathing, staying, and resting.
To breathe is to rest. To live while breathing freely, we need a space where we can rest.
