Discussion: Eunsong Kim

Eunsong Kim’s practice spans poetry, translation, essays, and scholarship in visual culture and critical race & ethnic studies. For this program Kim reflects on the exhibition Fear of Property and then joins curator Karsten Lund in conversation around questions of property, poetry, and art.

Kim’s first book of poetry, Gospel of Regicide, was published in 2017 by Noemi Press. John Keene writes, “These poems, mutable in form and style yet cohesive in their vision, suggest a complex and different order allowing us to ‘complete the story.’ Kim kills the king, and blesses us with a superlative collection as a result.” Or as Lillian-Yvonne Bertram puts it, “Gospel of Regicide is satisfyingly unapologetic in its propositions for alternate futures, histories, and homes.”

Her forthcoming monograph, The Politics of Collecting: Property & Race in Aesthetic Formation (Duke University Press) materializes the histories of immaterialism by examining the rise of U.S. museums, avant-garde forms, digitization, and neoliberal aesthetics, to consider how race and property became foundational to modern artistic institutions.

Kim is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Arizona State University. In 2021 she co-founded offshoot, an arts space for transnational activist conversations.