Seoul Photo Festival returns after 5-year hiatus with 'Come Back Home'

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Seoul Photo Festival returns after 5-year hiatus with 'Come Back Home'

Published: 08 Apr. 2026, 15:29 Updated: 08 Apr. 2026, 18:51

MICHAEL LEE
[email protected]

Audio report: written by reporters, read by AI

The poster for the 2026 Seoul Photo Festival [SEOUL MUSEUM OF ART]

After a five-year hiatus, Seoul’s flagship photography festival is returning — this time at a new home and with a broader ambition.

The Seoul Photo Festival will run from Thursday to June 14 at the Photography Seoul Museum of Art in Dobong District, northern Seoul, its first permanent base.

The 2026 edition, titled “Come Back Home,” takes as its starting point a deceptively simple question: What does it mean to call a place home?

The answer, as the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) suggests, lies not in architecture alone but in the accumulation of memory, movement and relationships — a shift from house to home that mirrors the festival’s own return.

First launched in 2010, the festival has served as a platform for contemporary photography in Korea, tracing changes in the medium while bringing together artists and audiences across the city. Its suspension during the Covid-19 pandemic left a noticeable gap in Seoul’s visual arts calendar.

The Seoul Museum of Photography in Dobong District, northern Seoul, just after its official opening in May 2025 [SEOUL MUSEUM OF ART]

By anchoring the festival in a single venue, which opened last year after a decade of planning, SeMA aims to consolidate what had been a dispersed, citywide event into a more cohesive experience.

Featuring 23 artists, including established figures such as Han Young-soo and Park Hyung-ryeol and younger photographers like Kim Min and Shin Su-wa, the festival aims to take visitors through a sequence of rooms that will allow them to “step into different lives,” according to SeMA’s press release.

Each section approaches home not as a fixed dwelling, but as something shaped by time, displacement and emotional ties.

″Flower Cracker″ (2024) by photographer Kim Min [SEOUL MUSEUM OF ART]

The result is less a single definition than a set of overlapping ideas: home as something built, lost, remembered and, at times, imagined.

That openness extends beyond the exhibition. Organizers have created participatory programs to enable visitors to engage with photography not only as viewers, but also as contributors.

A series of initiatives with the themes of “Look,” “Read,” “Talk,” “Make” and “Share” include film screenings, artist talks, workshops and a citywide project inviting residents to submit their own images of home. Selected works will later be exhibited at the museum.

Other programs include a mobile library of photography books, a photo booth for instant images and a network of 24 photography-related venues across Seoul linked through a so-called photo walk.

A photo from the 1956-1963 series ″Seoul″ by photographer Han Youngsoo that will be on display during the 2026 Seoul Photo Festival. [SEOUL MUSEUM OF ART]

Once primarily a showcase for contemporary photography, the festival now positions itself as a shared cultural space, where personal narratives sit alongside curated works.

“It will be ‘our festival’ in the sense that anyone can share their stories through photography,” Choi Eun-ju, director of the Seoul Museum of Art, said in a statement, adding that the new venue would allow “diverse memories and perspectives to gather.”

Beginning this year, the festival will take place every even-numbered year, an effort to ensure continuity after years of interruption.

BY MICHAEL LEE [[email protected]]