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Daesung Lee
Daesung Lee is a South Korean photographer based in Paris, currently represented by parisian gallery écho119. His early work was rooted in a concern for the environment, beginning with a series documenting coal mining regions in Asia. This interest gradually evolved into a broader exploration of climate change. In the mid-2010s, the refugee crisis in Europe and a wave of terrorist attacks in France sparked intense public debate around Muslim immigration. These events led Lee to reflect on the ethnic and religious tensions that triggered the civil war in the former Yugoslavia and its lasting consequences. More recently, his attention has turned inward, exploring his cultural roots and personal identity. Through the lives of women from his mother’s generation, Lee examines the social landscape of modern Korean history. Although he began his career in traditional documentary photography, Lee has consistently sought new modes of expression. His practice increasingly blends staged, surreal imagery with documentary traditions, pushing the boundaries of genre and narrative form.
In 2013, he gained international recognition as the first Korean to win the Sony World Photography Awards with ‘On the Shore of a Vanishing Island’, the first in a series addressing climate change. He received the same award again in 2015 for the secondinstallment, ‘Futuristic Archaeology’. His work on climate change has been featured in global media such as CNN, The NewYorker, Le Monde, The Guardian, GEO Magazine, and The Washington Post, and exhibited at renowned international festivals including La Gacilly Photo (FR), Getxo Photo (ES), Cortona On the Move (IT), Breda Photo(NL),Tokyo International Photo Festival(JP) and Backlight photo festival(FL).
In 2022, Lee was invited by Magnum Photos to participate in the 7th edition of SELF, an artistic project by high fashion house Saint Laurent. His exhibition ‘Parallel Universe’, created during the COVID-19 lockdown, explored humanity’s fundamental relationship with nature through a poetic and contemplative lens.
Since 2019, Lee has been working on ‘Love Your Neighbours’, a long-term project examining the memory and lingering trauma of the Bosnian civil war. The work received the ‘Bourse du Talent Prize’ in 2023, under the theme “New Approaches in Documentary”, and was exhibited at the French National Library(la BnF) in Paris. In 2025, his ongoing series ‘Nirvana’, which revisits the lives of women in Korea’s modern era, was awarded 1st Prize in the Series category at the LensCulture Portrait Awards.
