Hyewon Lee

Hyewon Lee's research traces the genealogy of techno-orientalism backward to the puppet state of Manchukuo (1932-1945), reading posters, postcards, and the pictorial magazine Manshū gurafu 満洲グラフ (Manchuria Graph) as an early laboratory in which a visual grammar of "Asia as the future" was systematized under Japanese empire and later inverted into the dystopic representation of Asian cities in global popular culture. She follows that inversion into the present through the circulation of Seoul and Pyongyang as cyberpunk dystopias in games, film, and online communities, and through the border spaces of the divided peninsula, where land inside the DMZ is traded through satellite images and cadastral documents rather than lived experience. She comes to these questions from curatorial practice and translation: she runs orcabooks, an independent press through which she co-translated Alexa Wright's Monstrosity: The Human Monster in Visual Culture (2021), Gyan Prakash's Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City (2024), and Techno-Orientalism 2.0: New Intersections and Interventions (2026) into Korean, each of which became the ground for an exhibition, including The Radiant City, Dark Rapture: Dystopic Images of the Modern City at SeMA Bunker and People Buying Land in the DMZ. She is a Fulbright Scholar (2026-2027) and a 2026 researcher at Tokyo Arts and Space.

Hyewon's research interests include techno-orientalism; the visual regime of Manchukuo (1932-1945); dystopic representations of East Asian cities; urban imaginaries of Seoul and Pyongyang; representations of Asian labor; normativity and monstrosity; modern and contemporary Korean visual culture; curatorial practice and translation as research method.

https://hyewonlee.site/

Languages

Korean; Japanese