Following the Korean War, the military government of South Korea sponsored specific 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 centre for wig manufacturing, relying mainly on its own female population for hair supplies and cheap labour. This talk traces the global trajectory of wigs, and connects the migration stories of Koreans to those of African Americans, focusing on their shared spatial practices in wig stores during Cold War in the US.

Min Kyung Lee, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Modern Architecture in the Growth and Structure of Cities Department at Bryn Mawr College. Her research concerns urban representations and especially the relations between mapping and architectural practices from the late eighteenth century to the present. Her forthcoming monograph, The Tyranny of the Straight Line: Mapping Modern Paris (Yale University Press) studies the surveying of the French capital during the nineteenth century, situating the emergence of orthographic modalities of urban representation in their scientific, cultural, and historical contexts. Based on this project, she was the inaugural Banister Fletcher Global Fellow at the University of London, Queen Mary University and Bartlett School of Architecture, where she organized a public program on the quantification of urban space. She is currently a New Directions Mellon Foundation Fellow and a faculty fellow at the Wolf Humanities Center at the University of Pennsylvania, now working on a project on Korean migration and the American built environment. She will be a Visiting Scholar at the Heyman Center for Humanities and the Center for Korean Studies at Columbia University during AY 2022-2023.