Kim’s life dramatically changed when she moved to Moscow at age 11. “Our family was the only ‘other’ [family] in the whole community. [Russian] grandmothers would look at me like I was an alien.” She often felt ostracized and sometimes was the target of racial slurs. It was not until she entered university, where she met other young people from different cultural backgrounds, that she felt more accepted and began to explore her complex identity.

Since the inception of her label, J.Kim, in 2013, Kim has sought to tap into her roots. She’s gone as far as the South Korean island of Jeju to research the uniforms of female clam free divers. Kim’s latest design project reinterprets the national Korean dress of jeogori‎ by using vibrant fabrics from traditional Uzbek costumes and Soviet-era materials. The collection and photographs reflect Kim’s fragmented memories of home—how she experienced her culture as a child without having any real understanding of its origin and her family’s complicated history in the Soviet Union.

Photo: Hasan Kurbanbaev

While Kim celebrates her mixed cultural background, she now understands that this colorful heritage came at a great cost. Her ancestors were poor Korean farmers who first arrived in czarist Russia in the late 19th century. They settled in the Russian Far East in the region of Primorsky Krai, which borders North Korea and China. There Korean immigrants developed their own institutions and spoke their own dialect of Korean. Their community thrived until the 1930s, when Japan and the Soviet Union fought over disputed territories. Stalin became suspicious of the Korean community’s ties to Japan. In 1937 he herded some 180,000 ethnic Koreans in cattle cars and deported them to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan during the Siberian winter. (Koreans were among many ethnic groups in the Soviet Union, including the Crimean Tatars, who were subject to forced migrations during this time.)