Michael Vince Kim
London, UK
Michael Vince Kim is a Korean-Argentine photographer based in Edinburgh, Scotland.
He was selected as one of Magnum Photos’ “30 Under 30” and was a participant in the Joop Swart Masterclass in Amsterdam. In 2017, he was awarded first prize in the People Stories category of the World Press Photo Contest.
Michael's work has been exhibited internationally and published in TIME, The New York Times, National Geographic, The Guardian, and M Le Magazine du Monde among other publications.
2017 - World Press Photo, 2017 - Magnum Photos Graduate Photographers Award, 2016 - Magnum Photography Awards, 2016 - Royal Photographic Society Postgraduate Bursary, 2016 - Viewfind Visual Storytelling Grant, 2015 - Magnum Photos ‘30 Under 30’
- Editorial
- Environment
- Landscape
- Portrait
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Far From Distant Shores
Michael Vince Kim
In 1937, more than 172,000 Koreans were forcefully deported from the Russian Far East to Central Asia as part of Stalin’s ethnic cleansing. Thousands died during the monthlong journey in precarious and overcrowded cattle trains and the harsh Kazakh winters following the relocation. They were left with no means of survival; starvation and illness became commonplace as they lived in earth dugouts while ordered to grow rice in the desertic Kazakh steppe, far from the distant shores from which they came.
The Koreans eventually assimilated to Central Asian culture. Their archaic Korean dialect, inevitably mixed with Russian, has almost disappeared. But despite many decades of isolation, they retained a sense of identity as ethnic Koreans alongside traditions and rituals that are still practiced in the Korean peninsula today.
