Lecturer

Dr Christin Yu (Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London)

Dr Christin Yu is a cultural and design historian based at Central Saints Martins, University of the Arts London (UAL), whose research focuses on the East Asian textiles, fashions, and intraregional materialities in the Asia-Pacific as objects of cultural memory and women’s labour through decolonial and feminist frameworks. She completed her AHRC-funded PhD at the Royal College of Art in History of Design in 2024, and is working toward a monograph publication. She is currently serving as the secretary for the British Association for Korean Studies and is an associate research fellow for the Transnational Art, Identity and Nation Research Centre at UAL.

Abstract

This seminar employs archival research, material culture studies, and autoethnography to explore ‘Korea’ through the diaspora, alongside diasporic objects and their histories. Patchwork is a textile formation, but can also serve as a methodological framework, reconciling fragmented memories and material absences by piecing together that which has been leftover. Moving from the institutional to the familial archive, we look at ‘Korea’ from abroad, and through the entangled encounters that complicate and enrich nationalist ideas of South Korean cultural memory and identity. Diaspora names communities of people that have been dispersed, scatted, and exiled; it is defined by displacement, whether voluntary or coercive. Rather than view such histories as emerging from outside of the nation, this seminar employs decolonial theory to create new relationalities of material, institutional, and personal memories, to argue that diasporic narratives are also constitutive of Korea and provide critical pluralities to its histories.

Online event!

Please register in advance: https://fu-berlin.webex.com/weblink/register/r62aafac436a6982d9516b9a825bda36a