Photography by C. Lurault

Chang Ki Chung begins as a fashion photographer in the advertising departments of major Korean groups such as Amore Pacific and Cheil Communication.

In 1987 he opened his own photography studio in Seoul. In 1990 his reputation as a portrait photographer won him the post as the official photographer for Mr. Roe, President of the Korean Republic.

Then, in 1993 Chang Ki Chung decided to move away from Seoul and its hectic pace to live in the countryside and devote himself to the kind of photography that had inspired him to become a photographer. There, following the example of the great masters he so admires, Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, he worked in black and white art photography.

Between 1993 and 2009 his new lifestyle inspired him to produce two still life series that belong to both the botanic genre, and that of everyday, familiar objects. In 1999 he began a new study and once again took color photographs, this time of the wild flowers he brought back from his walks, wishing to grant them a second life.

Then, for the first time, Chang Ki Chung produced an outdoors series in black and white, with the Korean west coast as the setting. During several years, from 2003 to 2005, he went on early morning pilgrimages to watch, through the morning fog, an "invisible road" appear and then disappear against the ocean, as impenetrable as the paths our lives take.

In 2006 it was his dove that provided a new source of inspiration when he photographed it, frightened and lost, inside an abandoned school.

From 2007 to 2008, the bright red of a poppy in his garden prompted the beginning of two new series, "Poppy 1 and 2," which were genuine portraits with an anthropomorphic intensity that brought him several exhibitions, both solo and in groups.

"Promises," his most recent series began in 2010, is an autobiographic journey in black and white, symbolized by a scenography built around the fruit of knowledge, the apple.

From 1988 to 2003 Chang Ki Chung was Professor of Photography at the Seoul Institute of the Arts, and from 2000 to 2007 he taught as a Master of the Photographic Art at the Sangmyung University in Seoul.

Chang Ki Chung is a personal photographer, a poet who perfectly controls light to dialogue with his subjects and render the objects or plant life that he photographs magnificent.