Today we’d like to introduce you to Jacqueline Kyuseo Kim.
Hi Jacqueline Kyuseo, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I was born and raised in Seoul, South Korea, until the age of 13, when my family moved to Hong Kong.
I have always had a passion for photography but it was only after I started attending my first college was I getting into it. I went to a small college in Hong Kong as a business management major. Around that time, I started reconnecting with my old high school friends, who all ended up pursuing art and/or photography. We would go on photo walks and start sharing photography/art knowledge. Slowly hobby turned into a serious passion which lead me to apply to art schools with photography degrees.
Initially, when I first started SCAD on the Hong Kong campus in 2019, I took a lot of black and white documentary photographs. When the Hong Kong campus shut down during the pandemic and I moved to the SCAD Savannah campus, my photography changed as well. Since a lot of my friends were in the fashion department, I had easy access to shooting fashion. By my Junior year in college, I was shooting countless fashion/accessories/jewelry collaborative projects and some senior collections that ended up in a small section on British Vogue.
Now, I’m in my Senior year, and I’ve been doing a lot of work that has to do with my cultural background, identity, and experience through portrait series and collage work.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
I struggled with finding my lane in photography. I never really thought I belonged in any of the three concentrations in the photography program at SCAD: documentary, fine art, and commercial. With the three concentrations, I kept putting myself in a box, which made me feel stuck and out of place. Through four years in the program, I went through all three concentrations.
End of Junior year, I started to expose myself to a wide range of art which allowed me to slowly step outside my comfort zone and start making something that made sense to me.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I’m most interested in making work that shows my cross-cultural background and my adolescence memories. From having to move around frequently, I taught myself how to deal with homesickness. One of the methods being surrounding myself with people who are going through the same emotions: being far away from home. Friends play a big role on where I find at home and the project I started with my Advanced Large format class in Winter was about the found community in Savannah.
Continuing from that, I’m also working on a collage project where I’m compositing my childhood photos to the landscape photos I took in Savannah to reconstruct my childhood. In a way, I’m redefining “my home” that I call today. Along with the old c-print photos, I collaged letters I got from my family in Korean, and origami that I loved folding as a child.
Any advice for finding a mentor or networking in general?
In terms of networking, I would answer to all the ISO for photographers when I was in my sophomore and junior years. This allowed me to figure out what I like and don’t like in photography and understand how to work collaboratively. Eventually, the connections I made on set expanded because they started referring me to everyone.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://jacquelinekyuseokim.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jacqandphotos/
Image Credits
Artist portrait courtesy of Joe Tankersley Artworks by Jacqueline Kyuseo Kim
