Jin-me Yoon
Andrea Kunard and Ming Tiampo
Featured works include Fugitive (Unbidden) (2004), which calls up stereotypes imposed on Asian Canadians and Asian Americans through popular culture in the context of intergenerational histories of war; and Long Time So Long (2022), in which, wearing traditional Korean masks that have been fused with ubiquitous emojis, Yoon performs against the background of an industrial waste plant that is also a natural bird habitat, to reimagine new ways of being in relation to nature and one another.
The entanglements in Yoon’s artwork are both micro and macro. Like her camera shots, they shift scales between the personal, national, transnational, and planetary, alluding to an ethics of interconnection at every level… The parallel investigation into the logics and histories of colonialism has always been the driving force in Yoon’s practice. But in her latest works, Yoon moves beyond critique and proposes new modes of being that draw from different traditions, remaking worlds that have been broken, and finding poetry in repair. - Ming Tiampo
Co-published with Scotiabank Photography Award, Toronto
Jin-Me Yoon is a Korean-born, Vancouver based artist situated on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Since the early nineties she has used photography, video, performance and installation to explore the entangled global relations of tourism, militarism and colonialism. Yoon’s award-winning, experimentally-driven practice has been exhibited widely and collected internationally. Professor of Visual Arts at Simon Fraser University, Yoon was recognized for her research contributions in the field of art when in 2018 she was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a council of distinguished Canadian scholars, scientists and artists.