Yunah Lee

Yunah Lee's research interests are design history, visual and material culture in Korea and East Asia, transnational and cross-cultural studies of modernity and modernism, representations of national and personal identities, and political agencies of art, craft, design and fashion.  

East Asian Modern Design

Yunah’s research focus is on the development of East Asian design and design history since 1945. She has taken her research in the areas of Korean graphic design, interior spaces, and fashion, investigating how modernity in Korean design emerged from the interactions with Euro-America, while being characterised by inter-regional interventions within East Asia. Her research explores how Korean designers and critics engaged with global innovation and creativity during the course. She is interested in building connections and networks with academics and practitioners working in the area of Korean and Asian design and visual and material culture.

British Modern Design and National Identity

Yunah’s doctoral research, titled ‘Selling Modern British Design: Overseas Design Exhibitions by the Council of Industrial Design 1949-1971’ focused on the series of overseas design exhibitions organised or participated in by the Council of Industrial Design between 1949 and 1971. Through the reconstruction of these exhibitions, the research positioned the CoID’s exhibitions in the context of British government exhibition policy and national publicity and reviewed the notion of good design and commerciality in the period of 1950s and 1960s. Through careful inter-reading of texts and images, Yunah analysed and reconstructed the contents and styles of exhibitions and re-evaluated the principles and style of good modern British design promoted by the CoID. Yunah’s study revealed that a constant tension existed between traditional images and heritage, dominant and popular representation of Britishness, and the contemporary and modern aspects of Britain idealized by the CoID in its own design exhibition, therefore, contributed to debates about the diverse aspects of British identity and its representation through design exhibitions. 

Retail design: department store

Yunah’s research titled ‘Design for Profit: Barkers, Derry and Toms and Pontings during the Interwar Period’ dealt with the role of design in retail business. Through looking at changes in architecture and displays of three department stores in London during 1920s and 1930s, the study pondered upon the slogan of ‘design as a marketing tool’ and how identity and modernity was represented and perceived in various visual tools in retail design. The application of the Art Deco style to exterior and interior space and the new marketing campaigns, especially the use of posters, was interpreted in the theoretical frame of modernity and Modernism in British architecture and design during the interwar period.

After studying the history of East Asian art at Seoul National University in Korea, Yunah completed her doctoral research on twentieth-century British modern design and national identity, titlted, ‘Selling Modern British Design: Overseas design exhibitions by the Council of Industrial Design 1949-1972’, at the University of Brighton. She has been teaching in the History of Art and Design programme at the University of Brighton since 2004.

Yunah is Principal Lecturer and teaches in BA (Hons) Art History and Visual Culture, BA (Hons) Fashion and Design History, MA (Hons) History of Design and Material Culture, and MA (Hons) Curating Collections and Heritage. She is Co-Academic Subject Lead for Literature, Art Hitory, Creative Writig at the School of Humanities and Social Science.

Yunah is primarily interested in the social and cultural meanings of design and material culture in the modern and post-modern era in trans/national contexts, and the cross- cultural fertilisation of ideas and styles, notably between Euro-America and the East Asia. She has been a co-member of two AHRC-funded research projects aiming to investigate the development of design history studies in China, Japan and Korea and to build a network of scholars and institutions in this field. Yunah has published her research on Korean design and design history in various academic journals and, in 2014, co-edited a special issue on ‘Transnational Modern Design Histories in East Asia’ with the Journal of Design History. Yunah won the University of Brighton's Rising Star Awards with Dr Megha Rajguru for two-year collaborative research project (2015-17) Modular Living in Asia and co-organised the international conference Modern Living in Asia 1945-1990 in Brighton, April 2017. She is the co-editor of Design and Modernity in Asia: National Identity and Transnational Exchanges (Bloomsbury, 2022).

Yunah collabroates with colleagues in culture sectors and contributed to Hallyu!: Korean Wave exhibition and catalogue (Victoria and Albert Museum 2022-3). Working with the Korean Cultural Centre in London, Yunah contributes to public events on Korean art and culture.

Yunah is keen to supervise research projects on trans/national identities and networks of design and visual/material culture and repressentations of design and visual/material culture in magazines and exhibitions. She especially welcomes enquires about projects on craft, design and visual/material culture in and from the East Aisan region including China, Korea, and Japan.