Young Ji Lee

Young Ji Lee received her Ph.D. in modern/contemporary East Asian art and visual culture from Duke in 2014. Before arriving at SUNY, Lee was an Instructor at Duke where she taught undergraduate and graduate courses ranging from East Asian art history to Chinese and Korean Studies (2016, 2019-2020). She was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Oberlin College (2016-2017) and Denison University (2017-2018). While at Duke she received the James B. Duke Fellowship (2005-2009) and a Chinese Government Scholarship (2007-2008). 

Lee co-edited the special issue of Art in Translation titled Modern and Contemporary Korean Art: Continuity and Transformation (2020). Her article on Chinese visual culture, “A Utopia of Self-Reliance: Dazhai and the Mutation of Global Capitalism in Maoist China,” was recently published in positions: asia critique (2020). Other articles on (North) Korean art and mass culture movements, including “Building North Korean Art: Pen Varlen/Pyŏn Wŏllyong and Ethnic Networks amid the Cold War,” “Loci and the Flying Horse: A Mass Culture Project in the Age of Chollima and a Visualization of the People’s Economy,” “De-Colonization and the Identity Formation of North Korean Artists: The Establishment of the Revolutionary Tradition between the late 1950s and the early 1960s,” and “Defying the Division of Labour: Lee Wan and the Made-In Series,” appeared in such journals as Art in Translation, Journal of Korean Modern & Contemporary Art, Journal of Humanities, and Art and the Public Sphere. 

Her current book project, Inventing a Visual Currency: Socialist Realism and East Asian Art, delves into how the production, consumption, and circulation of Socialist Realist images in East Asia engaged with economic conditions of global capitalism under the (post) Cold War.