Associate Curator of Korean Art & Culture, Royal Ontario Museum
Assistant Professor (status-only), Art History, University of Toronto
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Dr. Vicki Sung-yeon Kwon is an art historian and curator with a research focus on Korean art and visual culture, in relation to global contemporary art, transnationalism, feminist activism and socially engaged art. She is Associate Curator of Korean Art and Culture at Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), where she oversees Canada’s largest collection of Korean art and cultural heritage. Prior to joining ROM, she was a postdoctoral fellow of the Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies, at Seoul National University. She received her PhD degree in History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture at the University of Alberta, where she was a doctoral fellow of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). She has published her research in the journals Korean Studies, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Asian Studies Review, and Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies.
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Kwon has been active in the Toronto art scene, working at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, the Ontario Association of Art Galleries, and art galleries in Toronto, including Stephen Bulger Gallery and Camera Bar. Her curated exhibition Mass and Individual: The Archive of the Guyanese Mass Games (at Arko Art Center, Seoul) explored the transnational relationships between North Korea and Guyana. She also coordinated a transdisciplinary series of exhibitions in collaboration with artists, policymakers, and scholars of the humanities and the sciences, which resulted in exhibitions at international venues, including the UNAIDS headquarters in Geneva.
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Dr. Kwon is an award-winning instructor. She taught the arts of Korea, twentieth-century art in East Asia, and art as social practice in the Department of Art and Design at the University of Alberta from 2017 to 2022. Since 2023, she has been teaching Korean art history in the Department of Art History at the University of Toronto as a (status-only) Assistant Professor.