Deceiving Dragons: Affecting Tradition in Korean Contemporary Art
2020 Public Lecture Series
Presented by Korean Cultural Center New York and AHL Foundation
Online Lecture by Jieun Rhee, professor in Art History at Myongji University in Seoul, Korea
Wednesday, November 18, 2020
정은영, siren eun young jung,
Still Cut from Lee Deung Woo’s performance in
A Performing by Flash, Afterimage, Velocity, and Noise (part 2). Single channel video, HD, Stereo. 2019.ⓒ siren eun young jung
Cultural ambivalence stands at the heart of what can be considered the act of “inventing tradition” in contemporary Asian arts. By inventing tradition, this talk refers to a creative practice of self-fashioning one’s cultural sense of belonging at the local or national level. Particular attention should be paid to the way in which the act of invention plays out against the globalist system of representation in which Asian arts are often essentialized as signs of “Asianness,” an Orientalist construct of otherness that coheres into the world picture that privileges the Occidental gaze. This talk will account for a few examples of Korean contemporary art where local tradition is used creatively to challenge the globalist image of otherness.
Speaker: Jieun Rhee
Jieun Rhee is a professor in Art History at Myongji University in Seoul, Korea. She was the 2019-2020 Newhouse faculty fellow at Wellesley College and 2018 visiting scholar at MIT. Dr. Rhee has been widely published on contemporary Asian Arts in various journals such as Art History, Oriental Art, and N. Paradoxa. Her essay is included in Feminism Art Theory: An Anthology 1968-2014 (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015). She is currently writing a book on the interstitial identities in contemporary Asian arts.
This online lecture is presented as a part of Korean Culture Day 2020 for October program
