K-beauty Project: From Post-War Ashes to Global Desire

Book Manuscript-in-progress.

I have conducted multimodal field research in South Korea. This project aims to draw a holistic map of how US imperialism has shaped South Korean beauty culture and femininity, and how this history of influence is erased when Korean beauty culture is packaged and sold as a ‘trendy’ and ‘innovative’ ethnic cultural commodity in the US beauty market.