Korean Artist Lee Qoede After the Divide: Mexico, Socialism, and Another Modernism
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
5:00 pm to 7:00 pm
- Venue
- SOAS Gallery
- Room
- BG01
- Event type
- Seminar
About this event
Lee Qoede is a well-known name in modern Korean art—but how much do we really know about him? Much of what we do know ends with his time as a prisoner during the Korean War and then his move to North Korea. Drawing on her book Art, War, and Exile in Modern Korea: Rethinking the Life and Work by Lee Qoede, Jinyoung Anna Jin picks up the story where it usually stops, tracing Lee’s life and work after the division of Korea.
This talk explores how Mexican muralism and socialist artistic networks offered another way of imagining modern art—one that developed alongside, and often challenged, European-centered and Cold War ideas of modernism. Following Lee beyond the familiar story reveals an unexpected map that stretches from Korea to Mexico, asking us to reconsider where modernism happened and who shaped it.
This lecture is co-hosted by SOAS East Asian Art Research Seminar Series (EAARS) and the SOAS Centre of Korean Studies.
Header image: Huy Hung Trinh via Unsplash
About the speaker
Jinyoung Anna Jin is an art historian, curator, and author specializing in modern and contemporary Korean art within global and transnational contexts. She serves as the director of Asian art and culture at Stony Brook University’s Charles B. Wang Center, and she teaches in Asian and Asian American studies. Her research examines Cold War cultural exchanges, socialist modernism, and overlooked artistic networks linking Asia, Latin America, and beyond. Jin is also the author of Art, War, and Exile in Modern Korea: Rethinking the Life and Work of Lee Qoede (2025). Through exhibitions, publications, and film projects, she works to reconnect marginalized artists and forgotten pasts to broader world histories.
