Quick Facts
Biography
Joan Kee is an art historian specializing in art and law, modern and contemporary art, particularly East and Southeast Asian art. Her book, Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method, published by University of Minnesota Press in 2013, is credited with sparking global interest in Dansaekhwa, a major constellation of abstract paintings produced in South Korea from the 1960s. In 2014, she curated From All Sides: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method, a group show of representative Tansaekhwa artists that was widely acclaimed. A contributing editor to Artforum, Kee teaches at the University of Michigan where she is Associate Professor in the History of Art. As of May 2017 she is working on a book about contemporary art and law.
Academic career
Kee earned her PhD at New York University Institute of Fine Arts. Her supervisor was Shitao scholar Jonathan Hay. Research for her dissertation was supported by an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. Kee also obtained a JD from Harvard Law School and a BA from Yale College where she graduated magna cum laude.
Publications
- ‘Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method‘, University of Minnesota Press, Minnesota, 2013
- ‘Contemporary Art in Early Colonial Korea: The Self Portraits of Ko Hui-dong‘, Art History 36:2, p392-417, April 2013
- ‘Towards Law as an Artistic Medium: William E. Jones' Tearoom‘, Law, Culture and the Humanities, May 27 2014
- ‘What Scale Affords Us: Sizing Up the World Through Scale‘, Art Margins 3:2, p3-30, June 2014
- ‘To Scale‘, co-editor with Emanuele Lugli, Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015
- ‘From All Sides: Tansaekhwa on Abstraction‘, Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, 2015
- ‘The Measure of the World: Scenes From a Journey to Kaesŏng‘, Art History 38:2, p364-385, April 2015
- ‘Why Performance in Authoritarian Korea‘, Tate Issues 23, May 2015
- ‘Orders of Law in the One Year Performances of Tehching Hsieh‘, American Art (journal), 30, no. 1, Spring 2016
- ‘Art Chasing Law: The Case of Yoko Ono's Rape‘, Law and Literature (journal), June 2016
Fellowships & Awards
Erwin Panofsky Fellowship, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 2003-2008