Jeehey Kim’s research encompasses the history of photography, visual culture, and film studies in East Asia. Kim’s first book, Photography and Korea (Reaktion Books/University of Chicago Press, 2023), is the first book on the history of Korean photography in English. She is currently completing a second book, Photography and Death: Funerary Photo-Portraiture in East Asia, and has written widely on vernacular photographic practices, Cold War-era salon photography networks, and documentary film and visual culture in relation to gender politics in East Asia, with recent essays appearing in Aperture, the Journal of War and Culture Studies, and Trans Asia Photography, for which she also guest-edited a special issue on Asian American photography.
Insular Imaginaries: Foreign Presence in Jeju, Okinawa, and Fukushima
This paper explores the ways in which Jeju and Okinawa have historically been islands of foreigners, whether by invasion or by migration. Photographers from Korea and Japan, themselves outsiders, reflect on the arrival of outsiders on these islands — not only human beings but also natural ones such as vegetation — sometimes as violent forces, at other times as unwelcome guests or mobilized settlers. It focuses on the work of two photographers: Oksun Kim from Korea and Linda Iha from Okinawa. At the same time, it illuminates the imaginary of the island as isolated territory — not geographically surrounded by water, but existing as a space inaccessible from all sides. Juha Jung’s photographs of Fukushima reveal how animals brought there were then forced to remain after the nuclear disaster of 2011. Across these three sites, the photographs reframe the island as a condition of enforced proximity rather than a bounded geography. Reading them together proposes a way of thinking about East Asian island histories that holds colonial violence, migration, and ecological displacement within a single frame.