Jin-Me Yoon (born 1960) is a South Korean-born internationally active Canadian artist,[1] who immigrated to Canada at the age of eight. She is a contemporary visual artist, utilizing performance, photography and video to explore themes of identity as it relates to citizenship, culture, ethnicity, gender, history, nationhood and sexuality.
Yoon's work is known for its use of humour and irony in its visual juxtapositions to the complex subject matter she examines. Her major works include Souvenirs of the Self (1991), a photographic series challenging stereotypical constructs of Canadian identity; A Group of Sixty-Seven (1996), consisting of sixty-seven portraits of Vancouver's Korean Canadian community standing in front of paintings by Lawren S. Harris and Emily Carr;[2] and The Dreaming Collective Knows No History (2006), a video installation exploring the interrelationships of body, city and history.
Jin-me Yoon was born in Seoul, South Korea, to Chung Soon Chin (Jewel) and Myung Choong Yoon (Michael).[4] Her father relocated to Vancouver in 1966 to study Pathology, and the rest of the Yoon family joined him in 1968, shortly after the Canadian government ended decades-long immigration restrictions that discriminated on the basis of race.[5] Yoon attended primary school in East Vancouver. During that time, she became fascinated by the photographic images of consumerism she came across in National Geographic, Reader’s Digest, and luxury magazines that were available in the waiting room of her father's medical practice. When she was twelve, Yoon began using such images to produce collages.[6] In high school, she learned about art history during visits to temples in Korea and in the Time Life Library of Art that her parents collected, which introduced her to the work of Henri Matisse and Marcel Duchamp. Yoon enrolled at the University of British Columbia in 1978 but found the curriculum and its focus on Eurocentric, white, male narratives and creative production to be alienating. After graduating with a BA in Psychology, she earned a BFA from Emily Carr College of Art (now Emily Carr University of Art + Design) in Vancouver (1985–90), which was followed by MFA studies at Montreal’s Concordia University.[7]
Work
Yoon's works often employ photography, video, and elements of performance to question constructions of identity within specific historical and social conditions.[8] In 1991, the artist produced a work entitled Souvenirs of the Self,[9] which explores the relationship between notions of self and the Other within dominant images of the Canadian landscape, most noticeably those shaped primarily by tourism. The unconscious, memory, history, identity, place, and nationhood are important themes for the artist, whose recent project, Unbidden, uses multiple-channel videos and photographs to allude to the psychic and physical conditions of the subject, particularly through migration, diasporic dispersal, and displacement related to war and other geo-political conditions. An installation created in 1998, between departure and arrival, marks Yoon’s shift away from only using photographic images as outward markers of race.[10] Using video and audio in departure, Yoon investigates "interior, consciousness forming structures such as language."[11]
In 2009, she was a finalist for the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Grange Prize [12] and in 2013 was awarded a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship.[13] In 2018 she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.[14] In 2022, she won the Scotiabank Photography Award.[15]
Her recent video work explores various cities, most notably in South Korea and Japan. Formally tipping the vertical city of skyscrapers and bipedal humans onto a horizontal plane, Yoon evokes subliminal and inchoate associations with both the past and the present. For viewers experiencing the work within the gallery there is an uncanny sense of a dream-like immersion in the phantasmagoria of late modernity.[16]
Over the past fifteen years, Yoon has achieved international notoriety.
Select exhibitions
Jin-me-yoon: Honouring a long view, National Gallery of Canada (2024);[17]
Yoon, Jin-me; Knights, Karen (1990). (Inter)reference, part II: (in)authentic (re)search. Vancouver, BC: Women in Focus Society. OCLC889984324.
Yoon, Jin-me; Walter Phillips Gallery; Between Views and Points of View (1991). Souvenirs of the self: a project of six postcards. Banff, Alta.: Walter Phillips Gallery. OCLC63063897, 755687397.
Magor, Liz; Boyer, Bob; Yoon, Jin-me; Kidd, Elizabeth; Scott, Kitty; Phillips, Ruth B; Fisher, Jennifer (1991). Constructing cultural identity: Jin-me Yoon, Bob Boyer, Liz Magor. Edmonton: Edmonton Art Gallery. ISBN0889500894. OCLC26932527.
Yoon, Jin-me; Radul, Judy (1998). Jin-me Yoon: between departure and arrival, 8 January – 8 February 1997. Vancouver: Western Front Exhibitions Program. ISBN0920974309. OCLC38430635.
Yoon, Jin-me; Hurtig, Annette; McCabe, Shauna; Stein, Sally; Sekula, Allan (2003). Jin-me Yoon: touring home from away. North Vancouver, B.C.: Presentation House Gallery. ISBN0920293549. OCLC960167588.
Yoon, Jin-me (2003). Jin-me Yoon: between departure and arrival. Vancouver, B.C.: Western Front. ISBN0920974309. OCLC889990052.
