Jin-me Yoon is a South Korean-born internationally active Canadian artist, 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, a photographic series challenging stereotypical constructs of Canadian identity, and The Dreaming Collective Knows No History, a video installation exploring the interrelationships of body, city and history. She received her BA from the University of British Columbia in 1985, a BFA from Emily Carr College of Art in 1990, and an MFA from Concordia University in 1992. Currently she lives and works in Vancouver, B.C., and teaches at Simon Fraser University's School for the Contemporary Arts.
Work
Yoon's works often employ photography, video and elements of performance to question constructions of identity within specific historical and social conditions. In 1991, the artist produced a work entitled Souvenirs of the Self, which explores the relationship between notions of self and Other within dominant images of the Canadian landscape, most noticeably those which have been 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 of using photographic images as outward marker of race. Using video and audio in departure, Yoon investigates "interior, consciousness forming structures such as language." In 2009, she was a finalist for the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Grange Prize and in 2013 was awarded a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. In 2018 she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. 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. Over the past fifteen years her work has become known internationally and was shown 2008 at the Centre Culturel Canadien/Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris, France, Centro Cultural Montehermoso, Vitoria, Spain and Tank Loft in Chongqing, China. Her work has also been recently shown at the Up to/and including the limits, Argos Centre for Art and Media, Brussels, Belgium, Activating Korea, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand, Videonale, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany, the National Gallery of Canada in 2006, Ssamzie Space in Seoul, South Korea in 2006, the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2005 and in many other solo and group exhibitions in North America, Asia, Australia and Europe.
Embodied Enactments: Feminist Video Performance in Canada, 1974-2007, Centro Cultural Montehermoso, Vitoria, Spain
Passages through Phantasmagoria, Centre Culturel Canadien/Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris
Jin-me Yoon: Unbidden, organized and circulated by the Kamloops Art Gallery, touring to Mount St. Vincent University Art Gallery, the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge
