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Jongwoo Jeremy Kim is a queer, Korean-American art historian who debunks the canonical narratives of modern and contemporary art. He is on research leave until fall 2025.

Below is an excerpt from Kim’s recent book, Male Bodies Unmade (University of California Press):

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At the conclusion of his travel around the globe, Jean Cocteau commented: “Europe has its intensity only in vice, in crime. Alas, its virtue is in platitude. … The strength of vice is that it does not tolerate mediocrity. The weakness of our virtue is that it does, that it condemns itself to mediocrity. … One of the wonders of the East is its virtuous vice; the nobility of vice; its naturalness. An intense virtue? On every street corner. … A poet breathes, in an Oriental City. Everything here is a procession; orderly and insane.” … [T]his feels like a nonsense of binaries—good and evil, the East versus the West. … Yet I find myself unable to dismiss what is expressed in Cocteau’s pretend sagacity: the French man’s riddles thinly veil his anxiety about his homeland, which is conflated with his yearning for freedom in geographical fantasy that can—and must—appear real. In the West, Cocteau couldn’t breathe. I understand this—I had to leave the East to breathe. The historical irony here is this: it is much of Cocteau’s Occident, not his “Oriental City,” that I experience as a procession (like the room-to-room cortège in Le Sang d’un poète)—a rhetoric of make-believe incarnate. The following pages reflect this ruination of Western reason: orderly and insane.

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Male Bodies Unmade reexamines artworks by Audrey Beardsley, Jean Cocteau, Francis Bacon, David Hockney, and Robert Gober, as well as Pipo Nguyen-Duy and Andrew Ahn.

Kim’s previous research and publications dealt with modernism outside of France in the West (Painted Men in Britain, Ashgate), colonial sexual exploitation between non-Western nations (“Filming the Queerness of Comfort Women,” positions: asia critique), dysfunctions of a modern paterfamilias (“Picturing the Edwardian Family Man,” Art History), and the incoherence of male bodies in sculpture (Queer Difficulty in Art and Poetry, Routledge).

Kim’s work has been supported by the Clark Art Institute (deferred to 2026); the Fund for Research and Creativity Grant, the Center for the Arts in Society, and the Frank-Ratchye Studio for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University; the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art; and the Yale Center for British Art, among other institutions.