Koryo-saram

Spectral and Basis Grotesque in use for Koryo-saram, a personal project by Yegor Kim.

The student at HSE Art and Design School Moscow rebuilt the history of the Korean part of his family for the last hundred years, made a map of their relocations, introduced his own childhood memories and brought it all up into a heartfelt longread. From the project description about the Koryo-Saram (Russian: Корё-сарам; Korean: 고려사람, 고려인; translated):

In the post-Soviet space – in modern Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Russia and a number of other countries – live half a million descendants of those Koreans who moved to the Russian Far East in the 1860s. They received the name “Koryo-Saram” (“Koryo” refers to the name of the Korean state from 918 to 1392 AD, “Saram” means “man”, “people”.) In 1937, during a wave of repression, most Koreans were resettled to Central Asia: to the Kazakh and Uzbek steppes. During the 20th century, the Koryo-saram slowly spread from regional centers throughout the Soviet Union. They ended up in Kalmykia and Siberia, the Baltic states and Zaporozhye, Moscow and Leningrad. The wider the distribution of points on the map, the thinner the ties between the settlers themselves and their ethnic homeland and its culture became. Certain traditions were preserved, replacing the original meanings in the context of the large Soviet country.

Korean words (not shown here) are rendered in Sandoll GothicNeo.

Read the full article on type.today’s journal.