
Visual Art & Art History
Hong Kal
Visual Art and Art history (Asian Art History)Associate Professor
hongkal@yorku.ca
Accepting Graduate Students
Education
PhD State University of New York, Binghamton
Biography
Hong KAL is Associate Professor in the Department of Visual Art and Art History at York University. She has written on colonial expositions, museums, memorials and urban built environments in relation to the construction of Korean nationalism. In her book Aesthetic Constructions of Korean Nationalism: Spectacle, Politics and History (Routledge 2011), she examines exhibition culture by connecting visual spectacle, urban space and cultural politics. Her recent research explores the critical role of artists and the affective modes of visual images in addressing past and present injustices. She is currently working on a book project titled Visualizing Griefs: Mediating Violence and Trauma in South Korea.
Her recent publications include:
“Dispatch Art as Socially Engaged Radical Art,” FIELD: A Journal of Socially-Engaged Art Criticism, 27 (Spring 2024) https://field-journal.com/issue-27/dispatch-art-as-socially-engaged-radical-art-in-south-korea/
“Painting the Korean War Traumas,” in Transposed Memory: Visual Sites of National Recollection in Twentieth and Twenty-first Century East Asia, co-edited by Alison J Miller & Enyoung Park, Brill Press 2024, pp. 74-89.
“Public Art of Occupation in Contemporary Korea,” in Space, Place, and Community: Public
Art in East Asia edited by Meiqin Wang (Vernon Press, 2022), pp. 211-240.
“The Retrospective Witnessing: Visual Images of Grievous Deaths in the Korean War,” Asian Studies Review, 2021, pp. 1-21.
“The Art of Witnessing: The Sewol Ferry Disaster in Hong Sung-dam's Paintings,” Korean Studies, 43, 2019, pp. 96-119.