User:Unmeld/Sandbox

Jin-me Yoon (born 1960) is a Korean-born internationally active Canadian artist. At the age of eight she emigrated to Canada. 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 and video 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 cultural representations 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 human duress, particularly through migration, diaspora and displacement caused by war and exile. Over the past fifteen years her work has become known internationally and was shown at the National Gallery of Canada in 2006, Ssamzie Space in Seoul, Korea in 2006, Tank Loft in Chongqing, China in 2006, the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2005 and in many other solo and group exhibitions in North America, Asia, Australia and Europe.

I find that what may appear to be personal narratives in fact imply larger social and historical considerations. Seen in this light, what I choose to recount is no longer about me as an isolated individual.

References

[1] http://www.ccca.ca/artists/artist_info.html?languagePref=en&link_id=1835 [2] http://www.nationhood.ca/html_en/module_core.cfm?tab=2&modNum=8 [3] http://artspeak.ca/exhibitions/person_detail.html?person_id=117 [4] http://www.gallery.ca/english/546_623.htm [5] http://www.cybermuse.gallery.ca/cybermuse/showcases/meet/artist_e.jsp?artistid=14522 [6] “Other Conundrums: Monika Kin Gagnon in conversation with Jin-me Yoon,” Jin-Me Yoon: between arrival and departure (Vancouver: Western Front, 1998), 46-7.