Korea Remixed is a semester-long exploration of Korean culture featuring performances, screenings, scholarly lectures, readings, artist's talks, and more. Join us as we celebrate IU's connections to creative individuals reshaping culture in Korea, the United States, and around the globe.
Su A Chae received an MFA in Painting from Indiana University Bloomington and an MA and a BA in Business from Ewha Womans University in South Korea. She is currently an adjunct professor at IUB. Chae describes herself as “a Xennial who has had an analog childhood and a digital adulthood,” and much of her work explores the role of painting in the digital age. Her exhibition Cabinet of Curiosities includes recent works that draw from her experiences studying both accounting and painting.
Presented in Wells Library each year as part of the Remixed festival, Remixing Our Collections features an eclectic array of materials from various IU Libraries collections. This year’s event offers guests the chance to speak with librarians and archivists about IU’s collections related to Korea and Korean culture.
Join faculty, campus, and community friends for a spirited virtual discussion of Susan Choi’s The Foreign Student led by Susan Hwang, Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, to discuss the novel. Register for this online event and you’ll receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
Susan Choi’s fiction has won a number of awards, including the National Book Award for her most recent novel, Trust Exercise (2019). Her debut novel, The Foreign Student (1998), tells the story of a young Korean man navigating cultural divides at a small university in the American South in the years immediately following the Korean War. She will give a public reading of her work at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater.
One of Korea’s most prominent young filmmakers, Kim Jong-kwan is renowned for his early short film anthologies Lovers (2008) and Come, Closer (2010) and features Worst Woman (2016) and The Table (2016). The event will include screenings of his films Worst Woman and Made-Up Story, followed by a pre-recorded conversation between Kim Jong-Kwan and film critic Darcy Paquet.
Born in Seoul and raised in California, Juju Chang is the Emmy Award-winning co-anchor of ABC News Nightline and a regular contributor to Good Morning America and 20/20. She has interviewed dignitaries such as former UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and former South Korean president Lee Myung-bak. Chang will share her professional experiences and personal perspective during a public appearance in Franklin Hall, home to IU’s Media School.
Ross King is a professor of Korean Language and Literature at the University of British Columbia. King’s main research interests are Korean historical linguistics and the history of language, writing and literary culture in the ‘Sinographic cosmopolis’—with a specific focus on medieval Korea and the interplay of cosmopolitan and vernacular in other regions of the Sinographic cultural sphere.
Ahree Lee is a multi-disciplinary artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her BA from Yale University in English literature and an MFA in graphic design from Yale School of Art. Her most recent work “investigates how invisible labor, specifically work that has traditionally been done by women, is essential to the life of economic systems.” Lee’s exhibition in the Grunwald Gallery of Art, Work in Process, features digital media pieces and handmade textiles. She will give an artist’s talk in the Fine Arts Building.
The Institute for Korean Studies and the Arts & Humanities Council will co-host an academic conference on the social, political and cultural impact of K-pop featuring new scholarship from IU faculty, students and several visiting scholars from around the country.
The Jacobs School of Music’s New Music Ensemble is directed by David Dzubay. For their Korea Remixed performance they will be joined by guest composers and IU alums Yie Eun Chun and Texu Kim.
Yie Eun Chun has received awards and honors such as the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award. She was recently commissioned to write the opera The Red Shoes for Korea National Opera, which was premiered in 2020.
Texu Kim has received awards and honors such as the 2021 Barlow Prize. He is currently an assistant professor of music at San Diego State University.
TJ Shin is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Their work is “inspired by decentralized ecologies and queer sociality” and incorporates organic materials such as bacterial compounds and protozoa to create “living installations.” Shin will visit campus as the Gayle Karch Cook Center’s Engaged Artist-in-Residence, and they will deliver a public talk at the Eskenazi Museum of Art. The Grunwald Gallery will present an exhibition of their work in Fall 2022.
Born in Seoul, Dong-Suk Kang studied at the Juilliard School in New York City and is currently a professor at Yonsei University, as well as artistic director of the Seoul Spring Festival and the MusicAlp Festival in France. He has played with renowned orchestras on multiple continents and received numerous awards for his recording.
Cathy Park Hong rose to national prominence as a poet with acclaimed collections such as Dance Dance Revolution (2007) and Engine Empire (2012). Her most recent book, the memoir Minor Feelings (2020), won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was widely praised for its complex exploration of identity and racism in America. She will give a public reading of her work at the Buskirk-Chumley theater, presented in partnership with the College Arts and Humanities Institute and the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Join IU’s Asian Culture Center in celebrating the opening of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month featuring a panel of Asian American women, activists, and scholars.
IU Cinema will present a screening of Bong Joon-ho’s film The Host, followed by conversation about environmental interactionism and resilience with Joseph Shaw of the O’Neill School for Public and Environmental Affairs. Part of IU Cinema’s Science on Screen series.
Hyaeweol Choi is the chair in Korean Studies and professor in Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa. Her research spans the areas of modern Korea, gender history, religions, food and body, and transnational history. Her latest book is Gender Politics at Home and Abroad: Protestant Modernity in Colonial-era Korea (2020).
SE SO NEON comes all the way from Seoul to play the First Thursday Festival as part of this year’s Korea Remixed program. Formed in 2016, SE SO NEON have won audiences all over the world with their own brand of lo-fi, vintage sound and a wide spectrum of musical influences from blues, psychedelic rock to new wave and synth pop. The band debuted with the single “A Long Dream” in 2017 and released the EP “Summer Plummage” in October of the same year, quickly becoming Korea's leading indie music band and winning the Korean Popular Music Awards’ “Rookie of the Year” and “Best Rock Song of The Year’ awards. In 2020, they released their second EP [Nonadaptation] and single [NAN CHUN], and they were selected for Pitchfork’s “35 Best Rock Albums of 2020” and Paste’s 40 Best Rock Albums of 2020.”
Hilary Finchum-Sung is the executive director of the Association for Asian Studies. She was previously an associate professor of Ethnomusicology in the Department of Korean Music and associate dean of students in Seoul National University’s College of Music. Her academic work has centered on Korean music with a recent focus on the roles of women in sustaining traditional expressive culture in the southwest of Korea.
Hwansoo Kim is an associate professor of Korean Buddhism and Culture in the Department of Religious Studies at Yale University. His present research concerns colonial, modern, and contemporary Korean Buddhism from a transnational perspective. He is the author of Empire of the Dharma: Korean and Japanese Buddhism, 1877–1912 (2013) and The Korean Buddhist Empire: A Transnational History, 1910-1945 (2018).
Geun Lee is the president of the Korea Foundation and professor of international politics at Seoul National University. The Korea Foundation (KF) was established in 1991 to promote Korea to the world and to perform and support public diplomacy in order to deepen mutually friendly international civil networks. Lee will give a talk about the Korea Foundation’s Role in the Growth of Korean Studies in the U.S.
Korean Night is an annual festival in which the Institute for Korean Studies collaborates with the East Asian Studies Center to showcase Korean cultural groups on the Bloomington campus and share aspects of Korean culture with the community. The keynote speaker will be Seth Berkman.
Born in Seoul and raised in Lakewood, New Jersey, Seth Berkman visited Korea for the 2018 Winter Olympics, when Korea’s first unified women’s Olympic hockey team made their historic debut. Berkman chronicled this landmark event in his book, A Team of Their Own: How an International Sisterhood Made Olympic History (2019). He met the team while on assignment for the New York Times, where he has been a regular contributor since 2012. He currently lives in New York.
