For 40 years, Jung Youngshin has walked Korea's 600 five-day markets. Not as a visitor but as a listener first, camera second.
"The market is a living site of people and affection. Before drawing a camera, I share a conversation first."
Artist Profile
Jung Youngshin, born in Hampyeong, South Jeolla in 1958, has spent 40 years investigating Korea's oiljang (five-day markets), as both a documentary photographer and a novelist. She has walked all 600 markets across the country. Aspiring to write fiction since middle school, she found through photography a medium that could hold people and life more honestly than words.
Her shooting has a rule. Before lifting the camera, she spends long time in conversation with the market grandmothers, building a relationship. Her photographs, taken on that trust, carry the unstaged expressions of life. Books include The Mother's Land, Let's Go to the Market, The Alone Janghang-Line Market Route, A Pilgrimage to Korea's Five-Day Markets. Her 2025 solo at Gallery Bresson continues a steady exhibition rhythm.
The Work
Jung Youngshin's photographs are both documentary and portraiture. The market, for her, isn't a subject but a place where ordinary Korean time has piled for years. Up at 4 a.m., heading to intercity bus terminal or railway station, reaching a distant market and walking among people the whole day. Inside the frames: livelihood and affection, longing and community live together.
Her SAF works 1988 Midway Up Maisan and 1988 Jeonnam Gangjin — each pigment ink on fine-art paper, around 80×50 cm — reproduce memories of 1980s markets in contemporary print. Though years have passed, the expressions in the photographs remain vivid. That the life of that era does not disappear but lives on inside photography — these works testify quietly.
SAF
For an artist who has recorded markets for 40 years while trusting community, mutual aid is not a foreign idea. Joining SAF 2026, she places her long-held photographs at the site of solidarity with fellow artists. Sale revenue becomes a mutual-aid fund, returning as low-interest loans to artists pushed outside the financial system.
Discover Jung Youngshin's works at SAF Online.
Works by Jeong Yeongsin
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View all works by Jeong Yeongsin →
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Collecting Guides
Seed Art Festival
Published April 8, 2026
