SANGWOO KOH

Koh Sang Woo creates blue-toned photographic works that explore human identity and emotion through staged performance and visual transformation.

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Koh Sang Woo is an internationally acclaimed South Korean artist known for his iconic blue-toned portraits of endangered animals. Working through a distinctive process that fuses photography, painting, and digital manipulation, his practice gives voice to the marginalized through luminous, otherworldly imagery created using negative film and color inversion. His endangered species portraits transcend traditional nature photography by according these creatures the gravitas of formal human portraiture, their direct gaze radiating defiance, melancholy, and vulnerability. 

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By elevating animal subjects to human status, Koh articulates that the extinction crisis mirrors humanity’s own existential precarity. His work is held in major collections including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea and supported by organizations like the World Wildlife Fund, demonstrating art’s capacity to reshape discourse on climate change and interspecies coexistence.