Ja Won Lee Faculty Profile
Ja Won Lee
Assistant Professor
Department of Art
- E-mail: jawon.lee@csueastbay.edu
- Phone: (510) 885-4842
- Office: AE 1215A
- Office Hours: Wednesdays 3:15-5:15PM or by appointment
Ja Won Lee specializes in the visual and material culture of the Korean peninsula, with a focus on art collecting, gender dynamics, antiquarianism, and cross-cultural exchange between Asia and Euro-America. She teaches on a wide range of topics in the visual and material culture of East Asian, including collecting and display of Korean art in the West, global modernism, the role of female artists and patrons, Asian American art and culture, cultural exchanges through the Silk Road, and the issue of connoisseurship and conservation. In her article, “Collecting Culture, Representing the Self: Chosŏn Portraits of Collectors of Chinese Antiquities,” she examines how a trend in collecting Chinese antiquities had an impact on the developments of portraiture in nineteenth-century Korea. Her work has been supported by numerous institutions and foundations, including Columbia University’s Mary Griggs Burke Center for Japanese Art, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies, Japan Foundation, UCLA Asia Pacific Center, and Harvard-Yenching Institute.
Trained in ink painting, calligraphy, seal carving, fashion design, and art history, Ja Won Lee received her BFA and MA from Seoul National University and her PhD from UCLA. Prior to joining Cal State East Bay, she has taught at Columbia University, UCLA, and the University of Hong Kong. She was also a Mary Griggs Burke Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University (2018-2019) and a Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2016-2017), and worked on Asian art exhibitions and conservation at the Frankfurt Museum for Applied Art in Germany, Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, and Seoul National University Museum of Art in Korea.