This event brings together two artist-researchers whose work uses creative practice to explore Korean histories, identities, and experiences across global and diasporic contexts. Through textiles, walking, and embodied research, the speakers examine how Korea’s cultural and colonial pasts continue to shape everyday life and artistic expression. By connecting material practices, such as patchwork, design, and movement through urban space, to questions of memory, belonging, and cross-cultural encounter, these talks invite reflection on how Korean Studies can engage with art, design, and lived experience as powerful forms of knowledge-making.
Dr Kyung Hwa Shon - Urban Space / Walking / Deep Mapping / Situated knowledges / Embodied Experiences (Living) Archives
In this talk, Kyung Hwa Shon, interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and Tutor (Research) at the Royal College of Art, will present a series of her research-driven art projects conducted across diverse urban environments and cultural contexts. Shon’s practice engages with themes of psychogeography, urban space, and the public sphere, with a particular emphasis on post-colonial and non-Western perspectives. Central to her methodology is the practice of walking, which fosters an embodied, situated understanding of research sites and uncovers spatial narratives.
Shon will also introduce her current research project, which examines the interwoven histories of Korea, Japan, and the United Kingdom through interdisciplinary lenses, including (living) archival and museum studies; architecture, art and technology; ethnobotany; and East Asian colonial narratives that are often overlooked in the UK context. This talk will illuminate the intersection of Shon’s research and artistic practice, revealing the complex cultural and historical relationships that shape these geographies. Through explorations of memory, place, and shared empathy, Shon will demonstrate how her work invites collective reflection on the interconnectedness of culture, history, and spatial experience. By uncovering hidden narratives and shared memories, Shon seeks to foster a deeper understanding of how these connections shape both our present and future, bridging generations and fostering cross-cultural dialogue.
Dr Kyung Hwa Shon - is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and Research Tutor at the Royal College of Art
Dr Christin Yu - Seaming fragments: exploring patchwork and embodied research
This talk will connect practices of autoethnography, textile research and design practices, in a discussion about the role of embodied research. It will foreground my own positionality as a British-Canadian woman of the Korean diaspora in a decolonial reading of Korean womanhood through patchwork. Initially, we will focus in on the seam – the seam that connects two fragments composing the foundation of a patchwork cloth. Describing how my own experiences as a textile practitioner have shaped the lens of my research, I unpack how the structures of threads, fabric compositions and techniques reveal a rich material world of modernity encroaching upon Korea at the turn of the 20th century. It is from the interstitial space, that both postcolonial and decolonial theorists describe the borderlands of being, and knowing, which are mapped onto my own histories of diasporic belonging. From the material to the personal, this talk will explore both the object studies of my own research, as well as an overview of my pathways as a designer working in luxury fashion to academia.
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.
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