• List

| Research Focus |

Contemporary East Asian art

Lens-based art

Photographic representations of warfare

Collective memory & amnesia

Postmemory & generational shift

Transnational, transcultural memory

| About Nayun Jang |

Nayun Jang is an art historian specialising in contemporary lens-based practices in East Asia. Her research examines how artists challenge the selective construction of official memories and articulate counter-hegemonic narratives, while also interrogating the role of photographic and moving-image media in shaping and representing collective memory. Before joining CGSI as a Research Associate Professor, she served as an Associate Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, where she taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses on contemporary Asian art and documentary photography. She has also taught across several art institutions, including Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London.

Nayun holds a BSc in Clothing & Textiles from Yonsei University, Seoul; an MA in Art History and Theory from Hongik University, Seoul; and an MA in History of Art from University College London. Supported by the Korean Government Scholarship, she completed her PhD at the Courtauld under the supervision of Professor Julian Stallabrass.

Alongside her academic work, Nayun has been involved in a range of curatorial and research initiatives internationally. In 2019, she co-founded greenroom (https://greenroom.work/), an online curatorial and research platform funded by the Seoul Foundation of Arts and Culture. Through greenroom, she curates performance-based projects and regularly publishes critiques on contemporary documentary and performance practices.

| Research Interests |

Nayun’s PhD thesis, Art as Counter-Memory: Contemporary Lens-Based Art in East Asia, examines lens-based practices in South Korea, Japan, and China to demonstrate how second- and third-generation post-WWII artists challenge the selective construction of official war memories and instead articulate counter-hegemonic narratives. Attending to each country’s distinct memory culture—shaped by the legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and the enduring structure of the Cold War—the thesis analyses how lens-based artworks prompt a rethinking of the traumas and memories entangled across the region. It also offers a detailed account of how processes of decolonisation and deimperialisation were deferred and subsumed into rapid economic development, and considers the geopolitical consequences of this prolonged postponement.

Although her primary research concerns modern and contemporary East Asian art history, Nayun is equally committed to broader thematic and theoretical investigations in art and visual culture. Her work engages a wide range of critical concerns, including:

● collective memory

● postmemory

● decolonial thought

● nationalism

● art as activism. 

Alongside her ongoing research on lens-based media—particularly photography and video art—she has also actively pursued investigations into performance art.

| Selected Publications |

[Edited Volume]

● Memory Studies in East Asia: A Handbook (Series Title: Brill’s Handbook Series in Memory Studies), co-edited with Edward Boyle, Shu-Mei Huang, Laura Pozzi, and Desmond Sham (Leiden: Brill), forthcoming in 2026.

[Articles in Refereed Journals]

● 2025: ‘Visualising the Borderlands: Kang Yong Suk’s Korean State Village Photographs’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 26 (3) (June), 565-578.

● 2023: ‘“Counter-Monument” as “Counter-Memory”: Kang Yong Suk’s The Korean War Monunent’ (in Korean), Momentum: The Forward Progression of Photographic Theory and Practice, 2 (September), 1-20.

● 2023: ‘Transforming Non-Memory into Memory: Photographic Representations of Korean Pipokja in Kim Hyoyeon’s Gamgak Isang (Abnormal Sense)’, Seoul Journal of Korean Studies, 36 (1), 311-332.

● 2022: ‘Memory as an Ever Present Past: Photographic Representations of US Military Presence in South Korea’, Oxford Art Journal, 45 (3) (December), 405-426.

● 2021: ‘The Mixed Names: The Birth of the Photo-Essay in South Korea in the 1960s’, Journal of Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 42 (December) (invited as ‘Chief Editor Selection’), 130-144.

● 2021: ‘Capturing Shadows of the Wars: Memories of Camp Town Women in South Korea and Japan’, photographies, 14 (1) (March), 119-132.

[Catalogue and Artist Book Entries]

● 2025: ‘The Space of Memory, and Beyond’ (in English & Korean), in Hyung-Geun Park, Layers of Memories (Breda: The Eriskay Connection; Seoul: Vostok Press), 115-117; 123-125.

| E-mail |

● jangnayun@gmail.com, jangnayun@sogang.ac.kr