Speaker: Summer Kim Lee, Assistant Professor of English, University of California, Los Angeles
Moderator: Alvin K. Wong, Associate Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Friday, November 14, 2025
Time: 10:00 am Hong Kong Time (6:00 pm/13 Nov/Los Angeles)
Venue: On Zoom
In this talk, Summer Kim Lee presents work from her book, Spoiled: Asian American Hostility and the Damage of Repair (Duke UP, 2025), which engages with contemporary Asian American artists who challenge expectations that their work should repair the wounds of racial trauma. Recent Asian American cultural production has been praised for being healing, nurturing, and therapeutic—for “feeling Asian” and feeling good. Why is this what we want from our cultural objects? What is being expected from Asian American artists? What assumptions are we making about what processes of repair should feel like? By turning to the “spoiled”—what the racialized, gendered body consumes, wrecks, and inflicts in its desire and excess—Kim Lee looks to the work of Asian American artists who attend to the painful, destructive dimensions of repair, as integral to the kinds of healing Asian Americans seek.
Summer Kim Lee is an assistant professor of English at University of California, Los Angeles. She specializes in feminist and queer theory, performance studies, critical race and ethnic studies, and Asian American art and culture. Her first book, Spoiled: Asian American Hostility and the Damage of Repair (2025) is out with Duke University Press. Some of her published work can be found in ASAP/Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, Post45, and Social Text.
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