Chloe Kim, 26

Hi, I’m Chloe! Twenty-six, a photographer living in Gastown, Vancouver, in a brick-walled studio apartment with too many cameras and a view of the mountains that still stops me mid-sentence. I’ve lived here four years and the mountains still get me. Every single time.

I’m Korean-Canadian — my parents immigrated from Seoul in the nineties, and I grew up in Coquitlam speaking Korean at home and perfecting my English sarcasm at school. My dad’s an accountant, my mom runs a small Korean grocery, and my younger brother is at SFU studying kinesiology and eating everything in sight. Our family is loud, warm, and food-obsessed: kimchi-making day at my parents’ house every fall is a full production, with my halmeoni supervising and declaring everyone’s kimchi inferior to hers. She’s right, honestly. Sunday dinners are non-negotiable, and my mom packs me enough banchan to feed my whole building every time I visit.

Photography found me in high school when I borrowed my dad’s old DSLR for a class project and never gave it back. I studied photography at Emily Carr University, assisted a few wedding photographers, and now I’m full-time freelance — weddings, portraits, and brand shoots, mostly. I love wedding days: the happy chaos, the in-between moments nobody else notices, the grandmother crying during the speeches. Last summer I shot a wedding in the Okanagan at golden hour with the vineyards behind the couple, and I still get emotional looking at those photos. My clients say I make them feel comfortable, which is the best compliment a photographer can get.

Gastown is the perfect home base for a photographer. The cobblestone streets, the steam clock (touristy, yes, but gorgeous at blue hour), the old brick buildings with their fire escapes — I could shoot here every day and never run out of frames. My favorite morning ritual is grabbing a flat white from a café on Water Street and walking the quiet streets before the crowds arrive, camera in hand. And I’m ten minutes from the seawall, which brings me to my other obsession.

The Stanley Park seawall is my church. I run it, I walk it, I photograph it in every light imaginable. My regular loop is the full ten kilometers around the park, and on clear days the view of the North Shore mountains across the water is unreal. I’ve done the seawall at sunrise more times than I can count — there’s a particular spot near Siwash Rock where the light hits the water just right, and I have approximately two hundred photos of it. I’m training for a half-marathon this fall and the seawall is my track, my therapy, and my muse all at once.

Food-wise, I’m a Korean BBQ evangelist. There’s a spot on Kingsway in Burnaby that does the real deal — the marinated kalbi, the sizzling samgyeopsal, the little mountain of banchan — and I’ve introduced at least twenty friends to proper KBBQ there. My rule: if you’re not wrapping it in lettuce with ssamjang, you’re doing it wrong. I’m also deep into Vancouver’s sushi scene (this city does not mess around with sushi), and my weekend farmers’ market haul from Trout Lake is a whole personality.

What am I looking for? Someone genuine and adventurous who loves this city as much as I do. I want a partner who’s up for sunrise seawall walks and spontaneous road trips up the Sea-to-Sky Highway, who’ll happily be my model for “just one more shot” at golden hour, and who understands that family dinners at my parents’ involve being fed until you can’t move. Kindness, humor, and curiosity — I want the deep conversations and the silly laughter in equal measure. I dream of a relationship that’s a real partnership: we cheer each other on, we explore together, we build a warm, beautiful life. I also shoot a personal project I’m really proud of — portraits of immigrant-owned small businesses across Vancouver, from the pho shop in East Van to the flower stall at Granville Island. Hearing their stories while I photograph them reminds me of my own parents’ journey. And on rainy days, which Vancouver has plenty of, I’m editing photos at my favorite Gastown café, or attempting to bake — my lemon drizzle cake is decent, my croissants are a crime scene.

If you’re kind-hearted, up for adventure, and not afraid of a little kimchi breath, I think we’d get along wonderfully.