Jung Joon Lee

Jung Joon Lee is an art historian of photography and contemporary art of East Asia and its diasporas. Lee’s research centers on the relationship between artistic practice and knowledge production, with a current interest in transoceanic intimacies as an anticolonial aesthetic. Her book Shooting for Change: Korean Photography after the War (Duke University Press, 2024) examines how photography makes meaning and shapes history through the lens of Korea’s transnational militarism. Exploring photography’s role in shaping memory, identity, and social critique, the book interrogates how photographic practices have mediated experiences of war, the postwar militarization of everyday life, and the racialized US military presence in South Korea. Shooting for Change has been widely recognized for its methodological innovation and interdisciplinary reach, with reviews appearing in caa.reviews,The Journal of Asian Studies, and Korean Quarterly. 

Lee has continued to expand her research agenda, exploring the transoceanic and collaborative dimensions of photography and contemporary art. She is working on a monograph project examining transpacific and transatlantic photography and art exhibitions as sites of collaboration, kinship-making, and reparative practices. With performance studies scholar Yeong Ran Kim, Lee is also co-editing the volume Queer Feminist Elsewhere: Decolonial Making in Transpacific Art, based on the 2021 RISD conference, Queer/Feminist/Praxis, which Lee co-organized with Kim to bring together works by scholars and artists in Korea and the Korean diaspora. Lee has published in such journals as History of Photography, photographies, Journal of Korean Studies, Trans Asia Photography, and PhotoResearcher. Her recent publications include essays on grieving as artistic collaboration and Cold War temporality and images of transnational adoption. 

In 2022–23, Lee was a Society for the Humanities Fellow at Cornell University, researching site-specific, trans-Pacific, and intergenerational collaborative projects by Asian and Asian American artists. Lee was the visiting professor at Yonsei University’s Graduate School of Communication and Arts in spring 2022. Prior to her studies in art history, she trained in urban planning and worked for a global planning consortium. Issues of urbanity remain among Lee’s major interests.