Conceptions of Whiteness and the Geopolitics of Korean Beauty

Join us for a talk by S. Heijin Lee, Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, exploring how racialized traits and plastic surgery procedures are deployed in the service of capitalist expansion, even in the absence of white bodies.

Plastic surgery is particularly prevalent in South Korea. In her talk, Lee will present her research examining the constructed concept of Korean beauty standards and how K-POP and K-Dramas are utilized by the cosmetic surgery industry as advertisements that circulate worldwide.

This lecture is presented as part of the Gallery’s Institute of Asian Art in dialogue with the exhibition Conceptions of White, which offers context and nuanced perspectives on contemporary configurations of White identity. The exhibition examines the origins and present reality of “Whiteness” as a concept and as a racial invention that classifies degrees of civility/humanity.

This program will be presented on Zoom. Simultaneous interpretation will be provided from English to Mandarin.

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ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Heijin Lee is Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Lee’s research investigates the imperial routes of culture and media. In addition to her forthcoming book, The Geopolitics of Beauty: Transnational Circulations of Plastic Surgery, Pop, and Pleasure, which maps the convergence of pop culture and plastic surgery coming from South Korea, Lee is co-editor of Fashion and Beauty in the Time of Asia (NYU Press, 2019) and Pop Empires: Transnational and Diasporic Flows of India and Korea (University of Hawai’i Press, 2019). Lee has been featured on National Public Radio’s Code Switch and Throughline, Korea Society’s “K-Pop 101” series, at KCON, and in The New York Times discussing beauty, pop and power.