K-Masking Empire

October 16, 3:00pm - 5:00pm
Mānoa Campus, Center for Korean Studies Auditorium

K-Masking Empire Artist Mirae kh RHEE in conversation with Prof. Heijin Lee (WGSS) What does it mean to call beauty, adoption, and mourning care—when they so often function as forms of state control? In this conversation, interdisciplinary artist Mirae kh RHEE and Prof. Heijin Lee revisit over a decade of transnational exchange that began with a shared inquiry into K-Beauty. What started as a fascination with digital aesthetics and racialized beauty practice regimes has since deepened into a broader critique of empire’s soft surfaces, where care is weaponized, mourning is aestheticized, and visibility is tightly managed. RHEE will also present a short experimental film, Si j’avais quatre mères (If I Had Four Mothers), a poetic letter to an absent mother, tracing the fragmentary afterlives of a stolen beginning. Through speculative narration and archival imagery, the artist searches for recognition in the faces of Korean women photographed by Chris Marker, while interweaving personal reflection with literary and theoretical fragments to meditate on photography, visibility, and the unresolved tensions of transnational adoption. Together, RHEE and Lee will explore how beauty, sorrow, and humanitarian narratives function as masks for deeper structures of power and how feminist and diasporic practices can work to unmask, reframe, and reclaim. In doing so, they consider how rituals of beauty, adoption, and even mourning may operate not only as sites of care, but also as instruments of empire. Date: Thursday, October 16th, 2025 Time: 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm Place: Center for Korean Studies Auditorium


Event Sponsor
Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Center for Korean Studies, American Studies, and Ethnic Studies, Mānoa Campus

More Information
Dr. Heijin Lee, (808) 956-7464, shjlee@hawaii.edu

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