“To get around to your identity, you probably first need to learn about the history of your people and your family,” Jenia Kim says. “If nothing can be taken from the past, if it is impossible to reach for any historical facts, then you need to look for support in the present.” Since founding fashion label J.Kim in 2013, the Tashkent-based designer has been creating clothes as a means of exploring her own identity and heritage that spans continents and cultures. Born in Uzbekistan to an ethnically Korean family, Jenia is one of over 500,000 Koryo-saram, descendants of ethnic Koreans mass repressed and interned in the Soviet Union, now living throughout Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

The history of the Koryo-saram — or Soviet Koreans — dates back to the late 19th century, when the decline of the Joseon Dynasty compelled many Koreans to leave their homeland in search of better lives elsewhere. As the Qing Dynasty had sealed the Chinese borders, these migrants were obliged to move towards the Russian Far East, where they settled and flourished, primarily as rice farmers and fishermen. Not even a century later, however, the 1937 Stalin-led repressions — the mass deportation and ethnic cleansing of Koreans in Soviet Russia — uprooted these people and survivors were forced to resettle across Central Asia. Today, the Koryo-saram are a diaspora spread across countries including Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine. “I think that the main unifying factor [of the Koryo-saram] is a struggle to understand who you belong to and some kind of abandonment,” Jenia explains. “For me, this is like a separate nation or ethnicity, scattered over different territories — not having its own state.”

With J.Kim, Jenia has spent the better part of a decade reflecting on her Koryo-saram identity. “As a separate ethnicity, the Koryo-saram don’t really have a folk costume. I wanted to come up with something of my own: a folk costume of Soviet Koreans of sorts, but placed in the contemporary world,” she says. A patchworked floral jacket — now on display as part of the V&A Museum’s Hallyu! The Korean Wave exhibition — was the designer’s first attempt at creating one such folk costume. Over the course of 10 years, spent mixing and merging Korean and Uzbek elements, Jenia has come up with her own, singular design language. And she’s come to better understand her identity along the way.

Now that Jenia’s search for her own identity has come to an end then, the designer is looking outwards. “I want to find out how relevant it is for other people like me and find out their thoughts on this matter. I want to know how they feel,” she says. In the last few months, the designer reached out to a handful of Koryo-saram hailing from different backgrounds and experiences to speak with them about their own journeys.