Masters of Disguise: Masquerade in Contemporary Korean Portrait Photography
Online Lecture by Hyewon Yi, Ph.D
Director of Amelie A. Wallace Gallery and Lecturer of Art History at SUNY College at Old Westbury
Wednesday, September 29, 2021
Presented by the Korean Cultural Center New York and AHL Foundation
Online Lecture is available on KCCNY Youtube Channel at 12:00pm on September 29th.
This lecture introduces four Korean photographers whose practices revolve around masquerading in self-portraits—Nikki S. Lee, Chan-Hyo Bae, Jung S Kim, and Youngho Kang.
All born between 1969 and 1975, these artists questioned hybridization of cultures in the age of globalization. Using masquerade to explore their individual personas, they design props, costumes, make-up, and hairdos to create staged images. Lee, Bae, and Kim developed their projects while living in the West, where being confronted with diverse cultures brought awareness of their status as Korean immigrants, especially at a time when identity politics was in full swing in the art worlds of New York and London. They rely on subtext—subcultures for Lee; fairytales for Bae, Kim, and Kang—for their performative projects. Fluidity and artificiality, as manifested by their ever-changing appearances, draw attention to the superficiality of biological and cultural markers. By blurring the boundaries of gender (all four, but especially Bae and Kim) and race (Lee, Bae, and Kang), these artists challenge and destabilize conventional notions of culture, race, and gender as determinants of personal identity.
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Speaker: Hyewon Yi, Ph.D
Dr. Hyewon Yi is Director of Amelie A. Wallace Gallery and Lecturer of Art History at SUNY College at Old Westbury. An exhibition maker, she has mounted over fifty Contemporary art shows, written many essays about Contemporary art and artists, and conducted interviews with artists worldwide. Yi has lectured at a number of universities, including Amherst College, University of Massachusetts, and Stony Brook University, and guest curated at Rhode Island College and South Florida University.
Yi earned a PhD in Art History at The Graduate Center- City University of New York, where she was a recipient of a Leon Levy Center for Biography Fellowship. She received an MA in Art History from the University of Massachusetts, sponsored by her Korean undergraduate alma mater as a study-abroad scholar.
Yi’s principal area of research is Contemporary art photography, with a particular focus on the living proponents of quasi-documentary photographic and filmic methods
This online lecture is presented as a part of Korean Culture Day for September program
