Koo Bohnchang (b. 1953, Seoul) has devoted much of his career to capturing the quiet perfection of the Korean moon jar, an object of profound cultural resonance. In Korean tradition, the moon jar’s roundness evokes the fullness of the human spirit, and its subtle asymmetry reflects the beauty of imperfection. Through photography, Koo revives these vessels as meditations on time, memory, and care, monumentalizing the modest and elevating the everyday. In 2025, Koo received the Samsung Ho-Am Prize in the Arts, becoming the first photographer to receive the award in this category. His work has been widely exhibited internationally and is held in the collections of the British Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Getty Museum, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, among many others. Koo lives and works in Seoul, Korea.

A pioneer of Korean photography, Koo Bohnchang  has been reinterpreting traditional Korean aesthetics through a contemporary lens. After encountering, in 1989, a photograph of the Anglo-Austrian potter Lucie Rie, posing with a Korean moon jar, he became interested in ceramics, especially white porcelain, as conduits of history. “ The portrait showed Rie dressed in white, sitting next to a large white porcelain vase against an enveloping white background. The vessel seemed to me as if it was waiting to be rescued and yearning for its hometown (…) I still remember its imposing and stoic presence- standing next to Rie not like an ornament but her lifelong partner.”  

Koo began to seek out and photograph vessels displaced from Korea in museum collections in Japan, Europe, and the United States. An object of profound cultural resonance, the moon jar’s roundness evokes the fullness of the human spirit, and its subtle asymmetry reflects the beauty of imperfection. His frontal, shadowless images, photographed against rice paper and sometimes printed large-scale, monumentalize the delicate forms. "In photographing the white porcelain series, I approached each pot in the museum display and in the archival collection cautiously, as if to discretely unveil a demure model in portraiture."  Vividly charged, the photographs lean toward abstraction, with the otherworldly presence of a Constantin Brancusi sculpture and the softness of a Giorgio Morandi painting.