Biography
Soyoon Ryu is an Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago, specializing in modern and contemporary Korean art. Her research and teaching span East and Southeast Asian art from the late 19th century to the present. Her interests include art’s engagement with land and the natural environment, artistic collectivism, rurality and regionalism, interregional art histories, and ethnographic practices in art.
Ryu is currently developing a book manuscript titled We Live Here, Now: Yaoe Hyeonjang Misul and a Communal History of East and Southeast Asian Art, 1967-1995, based on her dissertation. The project introduces the South Korean art movement, Yaoe Hyeonjang Misul, as an entry point into interregional histories of artist groups who left urban centers to live in lands deemed peripheral within nationalist imaginaries, forging connections between land, living, and the environmental and socioeconomic conditions of artistic production. Her work has received support from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), among others.
Ryu received her Ph.D. in the History of Art at the University of Michigan in 2025. At the University of Chicago, she serves as a member of the Committee on Korean Studies and the Center for the Art of East Asia.
