Yook Myong-shim (b. 1932) made his debut in the art photography field by winning a grand prize at the first Korea International Salon of Photography held in 1966. This accolade started his career as an art photographer where he then subsequently joined the society of photographers in Seoul called the Central Focus Club (CFC). He liked to deploy the word, “impression,” when he referred to his early activities generating still images. He dubbed this early work and later photography produced until the 1970s as “Photo-Imagism.” The “Photo-Imagism” series reflects his view that social realism, established as the mainstream of Korean photography in the 1960s, was hegemonic and lacked representational variety. As an alternative, he engaged himself in activities from a modernist viewpoint and aesthetic strategy that was marked by alienation and photography-specific visual language. It was from the portrait of Park Du-jin, a renowned poet and then English literature professor at Yonsei University from whom Yook Myong-shim was taught, that the photographer began to produce the “Portraits of Artists” series. The portraits began to be produced in 1972 when he began to teach photography at the Seorabeol School of Arts and continued his tenure until the early 1980s. The portraits were taken to produce representations of many famous working artists, writers, dancers, painters, and filmmakers, photographic images imbued with their distinctive personalities and aspects from their daily lives.

Following the country’s rapid modernization and industrialization in the 1970s and 1980s, a time which Korean people made distinguished achievements in construction, automotive, petro-chemical and electronics, such efforts resulted in growing interest in preserving tradition and culture as the society went global. In this transformative moment, Yook began to produce the works which would eventually become the Korean Trilogy -- “Baekmin, Ordinary People,” “Jangseung, Totem Poles,” and “Black Sand Bathing.”These works reflect his quest to document traditional cultural identity and indigenous aesthetic sensibility of Korean people which he felt were slowly vanishing at an astonishing rate of speed. Preservationist-themed photographs via Baekmin, Ordinary People in the late 1970s sought to capture the portraits of “native Korean people” who were caught in the rapid economic development policies which  recast but also extenuated the archetypes and professionals and demographics -- from shamans, village elders, and farmers to artisans of traditional handicraft, Buddhist monks and nuns, and even the children congregating in Cheonghak-dong. In the works of Jangseung, Totem Poles, he wanted to find the dissolving subject position of Korean people which he felt contain a spiritual aura and distinct aesthetic heritage. The photographs of Black Sand Bathing, the third instalments of the trilogy, show the tradition of sand bathing maintained by the elderly women of Jeju Island during the hottest season of the year. The old women are photographed burying their bodies in the black volcanic sands which are spread along the coast. For the photographer, these representations of Korean mothers depict their struggles with the hardship and selfless emphasis on providing opportunity and love for their children. The bathing was, for him, a ritual of being reborn inside the pitch-black lahar, symbolizing the cycle of life and death and humankind’s vitality.

The last phase of Yook Myong-shim's photography is related to the spiritual heritage of the Korean people, represented by scenes of Lama Buddhism being practiced in public. The “Lama Buddhism” series of this period consist of the photographs Yook began to take in 1997, in the areas in which people still maintain the tradition of Tibetan Buddhism such as Ladakh, Bhutan, and Tibet. The artist found, in these remote parts of the world, the archetypes of “culture of life,” the Pure Land of the West he had been dreaming, and the land of his father, embodied in other cultures altogether. A devoted admirer of Buddhist and Daoist philosophies, Yook tried to capture, through his photographic practice, a world which is spiritual, provincial, archetypal, and religious.

1932 Born in Daejeon, South Chungcheong Province
1960 Graduated from Yonsei University in English Literature
1969 4th Dong-A International Photo Salon Silver Award
1976 Graduate School of Aesthetics and Art History (Master of Arts) Graduated from Hongik University
1975-1980 Professor of Photography and Assistant Professor of New and Old Universities
1981 - 1999 Professor of Photography and Creation at Seoul National University of Arts (Seoul National University of Arts)
1984 - 1986 The 17th Director of the Korean Photographers' Association
1999 Seoul Arts University Retirement Exhibition "First Land Under the Sky: Tibet", Deokwon Museum of Art, Seoul
2007 Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul
2016 "Korean Contemporary Artist Series: Yuk Myung-sim", Gwacheon National Museum of Contemporary Art, Gwacheon

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1932 Born in Daejeon, South Chungcheong Province
1960 Graduated from Yonsei University in English Literature
1969 4th Dong-A International Photo Salon Silver Award
1976 Graduate School of Aesthetics and Art History (Master of Arts) Graduated from Hongik University
1975-1980 Professor of Photography and Assistant Professor of New and Old Universities
1981 - 1999 Professor of Photography and Creation at Seoul National University of Arts (Seoul National University of Arts)
1984 - 1986 The 17th Director of the Korean Photographers' Association
1999 Seoul Arts University Retirement Exhibition "First Land Under the Sky: Tibet", Deokwon Museum of Art, Seoul
2007 Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul
2016 "Korean Contemporary Artist Series: Yuk Myung-sim", Gwacheon National Museum of Contemporary Art, Gwacheon