Jeong Eun Kim is the artistic director of the first edition of T3 Photo Fair Asia. We discussed with her curating a fair and the promising years to come for this new fair dedicated to Asian photography.
Dear Jeong Eun Kim, tell us more about yourself and how you’ve became the T3 Photo Fair Asia director.
I started my career as a chief editor of the magazine IANN in 2002 . I was publishing the magazine with a Japanese publisher and wanted to introduce Asian photography and translate it to another language than Korean. Many Japanese started recognizing my activities as a magazine editor and publisher. I later on run my own gallery space, XXX.
The T3 Photo Fair Asia is the first fair you’re directing.
As an artistic director, yes. But I was the curator of the Seoul Photo Festival en 2010 and I became the chief coordinator of the Daegu Photo Biennale in 2012.
Would you say that curating an exhibition is different than curating a fair?
A lot! I never thought about from sale perspective. Before, I was meeting people, greeting, and I explaining the exhibition, the artist and his/her work. But this year, for the very first time, a collector asked me a price. And I was like, “Oh, God”. I now try to ask every gallery how many sales they have got at the moment, and if they feel comfortable and satisfying.
Tell us more about this first edition.
This first edition somehow functions as the preview of our full Asia edition. In the coming years, we hope to include more and more countries and galleries from other Asian scenes, like Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam. We want the fair to be a bridge, to be a hub.
Would you say Korean and Japanese art scene art different?
In Korea, we had a different movement. It first differs between galleries. Japan has established galleries fully devoted to the photographic art while Korea has galleries that also present contemporary arts. As for Korean artists, students started studying abroad since the 1990s and began to understand how to talk about art and photography. I believe Japan has a different and almost opposite history. The country had a very strong scene in the 1960 till the 1990s but has lost for many reasons the ability of defending its contemporary creation. But a lot of galleries still embody this function and we’re presenting a very good selection of Japanese contemporary photography.
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