FEATURED AUTHOR

Jongwoo Jeremy Kim

Associate Professor of Art History
Hite Art Institute, Department of Fine Arts at the University of Louisville

Professor Kim’s first book, Painted Men in Britain, 1868-1918, reassesses masculinities in paintings by Sargent, Leighton, and their contemporaries. In his coedited anthology, Queer Difficulty in Art and Poetry, he examines Robert Gober’s beeswax sculptures and queer temporality. Currently, Professor Kim is working on his next book, Transplanted: Wandering Body Parts and the Queer Uncanny, treating Aubrey Beardsley, Jean Cocteau, Francis Bacon, Robert Gober, David Hockney, and Andrew Ahn.

Biography

Professor Kim reexamines the art of the last two hundred years to develop new ways of understanding its history and visual culture.

His first book, Painted Men in Britain, 1868-1918: Royal Academicians and Masculinities (Ashgate, 2012; paperback from Routledge, 2016), reassesses portrayals of male bodies in their narrative context, and analyzes transgressions of gender and sexuality in paintings by John Singer Sargent, Frederic Leighton, and their contemporary Academicians.

Professor Kim's anthology, Queer Difficulty in Art and Poetry: Rethinking the Sexed Body in Verse and Visual Culture (Routledge, 2017), co-edited by Christopher Reed, rejects the interpretive comforts of conventional ideas about sexual identity along with their usual binaries. Queerness returns to its origins as a way of acknowledging the instabilites associated with sexuality whether considered historically or as lived experience. Professor Kim's chapter, "Now and (N)ever: Robert Gober's Beeswax Time Machines," treats the artist’s beeswax sculptures from the 1980s and 1990s in relation to contemporary notions of queer temporality.

Professor Kim is currently working on his next book, Transplanted: Wandering Body Parts and the Queer Uncanny. It advances current scholarly debates on corporeality, temporality, and the unheimlich by reconfiguring the narrative of modern and contemporary art in relation to objects picturing a queer body that resists coherence and problematizes futurity. Discussing works by Aubrey Beardsley, Jean Cocteau, Francis Bacon, Robert Gober, David Hockney, and Andrew Ahn, Transplanted evaluates the “becomings” of modernism and postmodernism through the subversive visuality of queer body politics.

Education

Ph.D., Art History. Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, 2007.

Areas of Research / Professional Expertise

Books

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