Jung Joon Lee / Collective Grieving in Art: A Seminar on Transoceanic Collaboration toward Repair

This seminar invites participants to explore transnational and transoceanic artistic collaboration as a form of collective grieving toward repair, especially for those communities whose precarious condition is perpetuated by liberal humanism that undergirds neo/colonialism and neoliberalism.

Lee’s recent research, initiated before the outbreak of Covid-19 and finding profound resonance in times of escalating anti-Asian racism since the onset of the pandemic, includes how Asian and Asian American artists living and working between Asia and North America have organized themselves and created artistic spaces where new kinships, friendships, and solidarities can be formed, but not without tensions between artists and places. The artists explored in this seminar seek to repair the racialized disconnections (both within and between North America and Asia) that perpetually relegate diasporic Asians to “resident aliens” and marginalize them, especially when they refuse to partake in white supremacist, neoliberal, and assimilationist politics. Anchored in queer and feminist theories of art and media and critical race theory, participants will weave together anti-colonial and feminist critiques of Euro- and Anglo-centric historicism for exploring multisensorial and affective experiences of art making and viewing in Asian diasporas, with the backdrop of the haunting post/memories of diasporic lives vis-à-vis militarism, anti-Black racism, settler colonialism, and long-distance nationalism. Participants are encouraged to bring examples from Australia and other sites of diaspora.

Readings:

• David L. Eng, “The Feeling of Kinship: Affect and Language in History and Memory,” in The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 166-198.
• Jung Joon Lee, “Drawing on Repair: Kang Seung Lee and Ibanjiha’s Transpacific Queer of Colour Critique,” Burlington Contemporary Journal, no. 8 (June 2023): 142-157. DOI: doi.org/10.31452/bcj8.lee.repair

Jung Joon Lee is Associate Professor of the history of photography and contemporary art in the Department of Theory and History of Art and Design at Rhode Island School of Design. Lee’s research interests explore the intersections of art and politics, transoceanic intimacies, decoloniality, and gender and sexuality. Her new book, Shooting for Change: Korean Photography after the War (Duke University Press, 2024), treats Korea’s transnational militarism as a lens through which to examine how photography makes meaning and shapes history. Lee is currently working on a book project about photography and art exhibitions as spaces for transoceanic collaboration, kinship making, and repair. She was a 2022-23 Society for the Humanities Fellow at Cornell University and visiting scholar at Yonsei University’s Graduate School of Communications and Arts in 2022.

Image: Kang Seung Lee, Untitled (Tseng Kwong Chi, San Francisco, California, 1979), 2019. Graphite on paper, 20 x 20 cm. Courtesy the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles and Mexico City.