Koreans in Uzbekistan: K-pop and a brewing cultural clash

The ‘Korean Wave’ has breathed new life into Korean communities first exiled to central Asia by Stalin – but at a cost.

Tashkent, Uzbekistan – In the wooden drawers and cabinets that run the full length of his living room, Viktor An, 77, is rummaging through history. His jumbled apartment, a few steps up the stairwell of a Soviet-era block in a leafy outer suburb of Tashkent, is a messily kept archive of his life’s work photographing the Korean diaspora of Central Asia, known as Koryo-saram.

An’s parents were born in Primorsky Krai, in the Siberian far-east of the then-USSR, where a large number of Koreans from the north of the peninsula had migrated since the late 19th century. But their generation would mark the end of that great migration and the beginning of another.

Growing xenophobia and suspicions that they might be spying for the Japanese empire culminated in a decree, signed by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in 1937, to deport about 172,000 Koreans to the Soviet republics of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

An was born in Uzbekistan about a decade later, and studied hydraulic engineering before stints as a mechanic, radio and cinema technician, and later – unsuccessfully – as a farmer of onions and watermelons. It wasn’t until his 30s that he found his calling as a photographer for the Lenin Kichi (Lenin’s Banner), a Korean-language newspaper based in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

During the following decades, he travelled across Central Asia, documenting harvests, holidays, folk concerts and the everyday life of the Korean inhabitants.