Skip to main content

Jae Hwan Lim

Email:

jhl015@ucsd.edu

Website:

https://www.jaehwanlim.com/

Biography:

Jae Hwan Lim is a politically driven artist-activist and historian focusing on human rights and the struggles for democracy in the Korean Peninsula. Researching history and current issues in the Republic of Korea and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Lim creates social practices, installations, and performances that illuminate violence, discrimination, and inequality in society and politics.

Collaborating with Koreans internationally, he works to find the political meaning of being Korean in contemporary society. Lim serves as co-founder and director of Humans of North Korea (HNK), an organization that advocates for North Korean defectors and global citizenship, and an advisor at the Republic of Korea’s Peaceful Unification Advisory Council, among other peace and political organizations.

He was the Seoul City Youth Policy Network Culture/Art Department board member, Northwestern University Conference for Human Rights delegate and Hyundai Motor Company Art-Uni-On Fellowship artist. Lim has received the Hammer Museum Kay Nielsen Memorial Drawing Award and Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture Community Organizer Grant. His projects have been presented in the DMZ Forum, Gyeonggi Province, South Korea; University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies in Chicago, IL; Broad Art Center in Los Angeles, CA; East-West Center in Honolulu, HI; and University of Helsinki, Finland. Lim’s artworks and ephemera are archived in Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA).

Lim is pursuing his doctoral study at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD)’s Ph.D. in Art History, Theory, and Criticism/Art Practice Program. With his dissertation “Collaborating Society: Art-Activism for Divided Korea,” Lim holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio Area from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He received BFA in Studio from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an ISI certificate in Political Science and International Relations from the Seoul National University.

Gwanghwamun Square 2019