Curator Miranda Lash highlights Kim’s “Male Bodies Unmade” as a vital contribution to 20th-century art criticism.
Professor Jongwoo Jeremy Kim’s book, Male Bodies Unmade (University of California Press, 2023), was recently spotlighted in the Artforum series “The Checklist.” Miranda Lash, Co-Artistic Director of the Prospect.6 triennial and Ellen Bruss Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, named Kim’s book in response to the prompt, “What is the best piece of criticism you’ve read recently?” Lash wrote:
“I’ve long admired the work of Jongwoo Jeremy Kim and recommend his latest book, Male Bodies Unmade (University of California Press, 2023). Kim puts forward a radical and fresh take on the work of Francis Bacon, Aubrey Beardsley, Robert Gober, and David Hockney, among others, at the same time being fully transparent about his own ‘outsider-insider’ perspective as a queer, immigrant, ‘polyglot queen.’ His approach, which deftly leverages the benefit of temporal and biographical distance from his subjects, gives me hope that the best criticism about twentieth-century art is yet to come.”
Male Bodies Unmade is available through University of California Press.