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.
