Dr YeSeung Lee

About my research

My research takes the surface as its main object: biological, sartorial, architectural, and digital surfaces as sites where identity is negotiated and power is contested. I introduce a method I call Surface Poetics, which attends to thresholds and edges rather than any hidden depths, reading surfaces for their 'seams' and 'scars' as material evidence of the systems that produced them, such as colonialism or capitalism. Marking and wearing recur throughout my work as practice through which individuals and collectives contest displacement and reclaim agency.