Jin-me Yoon
Vancouver 49° 15' 39.14" N, 123° 6' 50.23" W Arts Media Arts Visual Arts Person
Jin-me Yoon is a Korean-born internationally active Canadian artist,who emigrated to Canada at the age of eight. Currently she lives and works in Vancouver, B.C., and teaches at Simon Fraser University's School for the Contemporary Arts.
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.
Her recent video work explores various cities, most notably in 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, Korea in 2006, the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2005 and in many other solo and group exhibitions in North America, Asia, Australia and Europe.