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Following the Korean War, the military government of South Korea supported industries to improve the dire post-war economic situation. Central to this strategy was to identify export goods that optimized local resources and knowledge, and that targeted international markets. Among those exports were wigs, and by the sixties, Seoul became the global center for wig manufacturing, relying on its own female population for hair supplies and cheap labor. These wigs were exported to the US and specifically targeted the growing consumer market of African American women. Moreover, wig stores were run by new Korean immigrants in urban neighborhoods that were in the process of becoming increasingly Black with white flight to the suburbs and red-lining practices. Parallel to the shifting racial and ethnic geographies in American cities, South Korea also faced socio-political change in which the women toiling in wig factories started to protest their working conditions. Their political actions would eventually mark the beginning of the Korean democracy movement. This lecture connects the migration stories of Koreans to those of African Americans, focusing on their shared spatial practices in wig stores during the Cold War period in the US.

Min Kyung Lee is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of the Growth and Structure of Cities at Bryn Mawr College. Her recent monograph, The Tyranny of the Straight Line: Mapping Modern Paris (Yale University Press, 2024) studied the relations between mapping and architecture in 19th-century Paris. Her research in this area brings together histories of orthography and quantification with theories of modern architectural and urban representations. Currently, her work, Mapping Wigs and Plywood centers on histories of post-war Korean migration as well as developing archival methods with and by diasporic communities. She is a co-founder of the Architecture and Migration group of the European Architectural History Network, supported by the New Directions Mellon Foundation Fellowship, and affiliated with research groups at the Courtauld in London and the Kunsthistorische Institut in Florence.

*This event will not be livestreamed or recorded.