Sunghoon (Hoon) Lee is a PhD candidate studying Southern Renaissance and Baroque art within a global context. His interests include scale, mobility, and colonialism. His dissertation, tentatively entitled “Escala: Art, Scale, and Geographic Vastness,” explores visual culture related to the colonial Philippines through which Spaniards perceived, measured, and overcame notions of geographic distance and vastness. Positioned at the extreme edge of the world’s largest empire, the colonial Philippine art, he argues, demonstrates both the globe’s extensiveness and unwieldiness and the Spanish empire’s desire to manage, explore, and exploit the global scale.
Hoon earned his BA in Geography Education and Art History from Seoul National University with distinction in 2013 and his MA in Art History from Indiana University in 2017. His research has been supported by the Korean National Research Fellowship for Humanities, the Charles Williams Graduate Fellowship, Newberry Library, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, and Bibliotheca Hertizana—Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte.