Over the last three years, Cindy Hwang has invited nearly 200 individuals into her New York City living room studio. There, against the backdrop of a bare white wall and a hardwood floor, the photographer has snapped full-length portraits of actors, teachers, comics, athletes, executives and retirees — individuals who would appear to not have much in common with each other, save for one trait: their Korean ancestry.

It is part of a photojournalism collection she calls The KYOPO Project, an ongoing endeavor in which she captures the portraits and stories of a cross-section of individuals of Korean descent who have spent the greater part of their lives in places such as the United States, Europe or South America.

The collection, which debuts as a photographic exhibit at the Korea Society in New York next spring, revolves around the term kyopo, which refers to individuals of Korean descent who grew up or live in a country outside the Korean peninsula.

“This project is way beyond the Korean factor. It hits different parallels of different types of struggles, especially those that other immigrants have had,” she said. “You deal with a spectrum of individuals of various demographic and socioeconomic levels.”

Hwang, a 33-year-old Korean American who grew up in Rockville, Md., a middle-class suburb of Washington, D.C., avoided using any specific criteria in selecting her participants. It was the organic process through which she found her subjects that lends the collection its sense of intimacy: all of those photographed are friends or acquaintances referred to her by previous participants, resulting in a heterogeneous sample of individuals unearthed largely through word of mouth.

What has resulted so far is a collection of individuals who vary from well-known figures such as author Chang-Rae Lee, actor Daniel Dae Kim and Ahn Trio violinist Angella Ahn to everyday figures including a nail salon owner, a university professor, a pop culture magazine editor, an architect and the first Korean American female fighter pilot to fly an Apache helicopter.

“They’re not hand-chosen, they’re not researched, I just kind of left the book open,” said Hwang, of her profile subjects, who range in age from five to 90.

“[The collection] remarks on such a nourishing message, which is being open-minded and accepting of every individual. A lot of people said ‘Yeah, I’m Korean, but it doesn’t define all of me.’”

Hwang continues to add to her collection of portraits, hoping eventually to turn it into a traveling multimedia exhibit with an accompanying Web site and book. She is currently in talks with the Asian Pacific American Program at The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., to set up an exhibit there next year.

A 1997 graduate in fashion design from the Fashion Institute of Technology, Hwang was exposed to photography at an early age. Her father, Sae Hwang, was a computer programmer and amateur photographer who moved his family to the United States from Korea when Cindy was 1.