People

Jongwoo Jeremy Kim is a queer, Korean-American art historian who debunks the canonical, white narratives of modern and contemporary art. Rather than focusing on gambits and triumphs, he finds fragility, failure, misdirection, and misalignment at the core of Western artmaking. Furthermore, Kim defines modernism and its aftermath from sexually insurrectionist, decolonial, and antiracist points of view, rehabilitating our relationship to our broken past and its precarious futurity.

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), the dysfunction of the white man and his family (“Picturing the Edwardian Family Man,” Art History), and the incoherence of white male bodies (Queer Difficulty in Art and Poetry, Routledge). Extending Kim’s growing arc of scholarship, his new book Male Bodies Unmade (University of California Press, 2023) treats what the twentieth-century representations of gay white masculinity mean to queer Asian-American immigrants.

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, as well as 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.

As a member of CMU’s School of Art, Jongwoo Jeremy Kim has been active in the University’s DEI initiatives. His anti-racist curricular revision produced undergraduate courses that must retell the fabulation of modern and contemporary art by restoring BIPOC artworks as the speaking subjects of our history.