Kang Seung Lee’s Archive: Drawing Queer Elders, Undead with Jongwoo jeremy kim

In this Research and Academic Program lecture, Jongwoo Jeremy Kim (Carnegie Mellon University / Gould Foundation Fellow) investigates how the Korean American artist Kang Seung Lee redraws family trees by tracing not bloodlines, but queer affinity. Ancestral worship is reworked to designate queer elders who carved out paths of survival as artists. Excerpted from his new book manuscript Korean Accent, Asian Accent: Picturing Queer Selfhood Across the Pacific, Kim’s talk will focus on Lee’s drawings from 2019, based on Tseng Kwong Chi’s photographs such as Cotton Field, Tennessee, 1979, and Grand Canyon, Arizona, 1987. In reconstituting the line of belonging and rethinking time structures, Lee pencil-copies Chi as a way of envisioning an alternative lineage of chosen family of the Asian queer. Lee escapes the conventional bounds of filial piety to locate deceased gender-dissidents in the history of Asian American art, refusing hereditary mandates of Korean familial ideology.

Presented in person in the Clark auditorium. A 5 pm reception in the Manton Research Center reading room precedes the event.

Image: Kang Seung Lee, Untitled (Tseng Kwong Chi, Grand Canyon, Arizona, 1987), 2019. Graphite on paper, 8 x 8 inches (20 x 20 cm).