Hyeongjin Oh

I am currently working on my first book manuscript, titled On Currents: Inscribing the Pacific in Art History between 1800 and the Present. The book is a transoceanic study of seascapes and ocean imagery across entangled histories of American, East Asian, Pacific Islander, and sub-Arctic art. In it, I ask how artistis across the Pacific world have captured the elemental forces of the ocean, their communities; embeddedness in it, and the social lives of humans acted upon by oceanic elements, thereby visualizing the liquescent world as a driving agent rather than a resource of nation-building, migration, and modernity. The book traces maritime trajectories of historical artworks and goods by American landscape painters, Joseon literati artists, Japanese woodblock printers, Qing cartographers, New England whalers, Russo-Inuit fur traders, documentary photographers of labor protests, environmentalist filmmakers chronicling extraction, and Cold War spies crossing the peninsula's coasts and hinterlands. These trajectories reveal how the Pacific's currents, extraction infrastructures, and epistemological systems synchronized the material perceptions and global imaginaries of different societies that seemed remote to one another long before their entanglement entered explicit historical consciousness. Reading works of art as sensors of transoceanic movements, the book integrates American, East Asian, and Pacific Indigenous art histories from the early modern period onward, arguingf that their apparent separateness has always been an effect of anthropocentric periodization rather than actual connection.

For the 2027 Fall term, I am developing a course on American art history, tentatively titled "Art on Trial." The course asks why art in the United States has so often become the object of litigation, censorship, protest, and vandalism, and what those moments reveal about the political conditions under which images and objects can appear in public. Through case studies ranging from nineteenth-century mural disputes and obscenity trials to contemporary controversies over Sam Durant's Scaffold at the Walker Art Center, near the historical execution site of the Dakota 38, Dana Schutz's Open Casket at the Whitney Biennial, and Kehinde Wiley's Confederate-Monument replacements at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, students inhabit the multiple positions that arts controversies produce—artist, curator, critic, funder, protestor, viewer--and develop the argumentative and civic capacities that art historical practice can uniquely cultivate. Many of these controversies moved from the museum into the courtroom, and the resulting court rulings on obscenity, public sponsorship, free speech, artistic authorship, and repatriation serve as seminar art historical materials that let students trace how the aesthetic and civic dimensions of art in America and the transpacific world have been legally, ethically, and politically defined.

The course also draws on comparative cases from Korean art history—the US-allied art world's state censorship over figurative paintings that institutionally reinforced Korean abstraction, #MeToo reckonings with sexually abusive curators and professors in the 2010s, and the international controversies over the "Comfort Women: statues installed in Seoul, Berlin, San Francisco, and other cities—to press students beyond the assumption that arts controversies are peculiarly American problems. In doing so, the course frames arts controversies as flashpoints of global art and political ecologies through which the terms of American public life, and the transnational conditions that shape them, are contested and remade.