Hye-Kyung Lee joined King’s College London in September 2004 after obtaining a PhD from the University of Warwick. She grew up in Seoul, South Korea, and studied Chinese language and literature at Seoul National University. Before coming to the UK for her MA and PhD studies, she worked as an international cultural exchange coordinator at the Korea Foundation and organised various performances, exhibitions and festivals in Korea and many Asian countries.

Research Interests and PhD Supervision

• Cultural policy
• State policy on cultural and creative industries
• Arts Council and arts policy
• Cultural policies in East Asia
• Korean cultural policy and cultural industries
• Creativity, cultural production and Gen AI
• Cultural work, labour and trade union

Hye-Kyung Lee has researched and written on state policies for culture, arts and creative industries. Her approach is focused on exploring institutional and historical perspectives of the culture-state-market dynamics, de-Westernising/internationalising cultural policy ideas and frameworks and exploring new justifications for state subsidy for the cultural sector. She has also worked on cultural marketing, cultural flows and fandom. Hye-Kyung was the UK principal investigator of the UKRI-JSPS funded 3-year project ‘Sustainable Cultural Futures' (2022 to early 2025). This was the first major UK-Japan collaborative project on cultural policy, which examined values and purpose of cultural policy, the institutions of cultural work and the digital pivot in the cultural sector, including the rise of AI. She was a Co-I of the ESRC funded 'Globalizing South Korean Creativity' project (2022-early 2024). Hye-Kyung' books include Cultural Policies in East Asia (2014), Routledge Handbook of Cultural and Creative Industries in Asia (2019), Asian Cultural Flows (2018) and Cultural Policy in South Korea: Making a New Patron State (2019). She is a co-editor-in chief of Cultural Trends and is writing a book on cultural industry policy in South Korea.

Hye-Kyung welcomes applications for PhD topics related to any of her research interests. For more details, please see her full research profile.

Teaching

Hye-Kyung Lee teaches on CMCI’s BA and MA programmes, focusing on cultural policy, governance and creative industries.

Expertise and Public Engagement

Cultural policy and Korean cultural policy

Selected Publications

• Cultural Policy in South Korea: Making a New Patron State
• Rethinking creativity: creative industries, AI and everyday creativity
• Reflecting on cultural labour in the time of AI
• Supporting the cultural industries using venture capital: a policy experiment from South Korea
• The Covid-19 crisis and ‘critical juncture’ in cultural policy: a comparative analysis of cultural policy responses in South Korea, Japan and China