Dr. Sooran Choi, Assistant Professor of Art and Art History at the University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, specializes in decolonization within avant-garde discourse, global feminism, and ecocriticism, with a focus on contemporary East Asian art. Her current book manuscript, titled Zombie Avant-Gardes: Subterfuge in Postwar South Korean Art," explores post-WWII global interdisciplinary artistic exchanges among East Asia, the United States, and Europe. It highlights South Korean renditions of avant-garde art viewed through post-colonial lenses, moving beyond the center-periphery binaries.
Her research and publications seek to decolonize the very structure of avant-garde conceptual frameworks and global art history, by contextualizing South Korean postwar art within social-political and cultural terrains. Her efforts are reflected in recent publications, including “Manifestations of a Zombie Avant-garde: South Korean Performance and Conceptual Art in the 1970s" (Rebus: Mobility, Movement, and Medium: Crossing Borders in Art, Essex University, Spring 2020); "Camouflaged Dissent—A Plastic Umbrella and Transparent Balloons: ‘Happenings’ in South Korea, 1967–1968" (Multiple Modernisms: New Histories of Art in the Global Postwar Era, Routledge, 2021); "Korean Shamanism in Action/Art: The Counter-cultural Spirituality of Women and Gender Fluidity" (in Religion and the Arts, Brill, May 2023); and "‘Total Art’ in Disguise--the Aesthetic of Anarchistic Intervention: the Fourth Group in Cold War South Korea, 1970" (forthcoming, a special issue “The Ultraleft and International Postwar Art (1945-1980)," in Oxford Art Journal), among others.
She received the 2018 College Art Association (CAA) Professional Development Fellowship for the early version of her current book project. Additional awards include the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics Dissertation Fellowship, research grants from The Academy of Korean Studies, and the Black, Race, and Ethnic Studies Initiative grant from the Mellon Foundation, which launched the Cross-Ethno-Gender Korean/Asian Studies Initiative (CEGKASI).
