Hyeongjin Oh

I am working on my first book, On Currents: Inscribing the Pacific in Art History between 1800 and the Present, a transoceanic study of seascapes and ocean imagery across American, East Asian, Pacific Islander, and sub-Arctic art. In it, I ask how artists across the Pacific world have captured the ocean's elemental forces and the social lives they act upon, visualizing the liquescent world as a driving agent rather than a resource of nation-building, migration, and modernity. The book traces maritime trajectories of artworks and goods across two periods. In the nineteenth century, it follows the works of American landscape painters, Joseon literati artists, Japanese woodblock printers, Qing cartographers, New England whalers, and Russo-Inuit fur traders. In the modern and contemporary periods, it turns to American, Korean, and Pacific Islander photographers, painters, and conceptual artists, along with popular ocean imagery produced by environmentalist activism and Cold War propaganda across the circum-Pacific. These trajectories reveal how the Pacific's currents, extraction infrastructures, and epistemological systems synchronized the material perceptions and global imaginaries of societies that seemed remote to one another long before their entanglement entered explicit historical consciousness. Integrating American, East Asian, and American-Pacific Indigenous art histories from the early modern period onward, the book argues that their apparent separateness has been an effect of anthropocentric periodization rather than actual connection.