Biography:
Jin-me Yoon (b. 1960, Seoul, KR) is a Vancouver-based artist whose work explores the entangled relations of tourism, militarism, and colonialism. Since the early 1990s, she has used photography, video, and performance to situate her personal experience of migration in relation to unfolding historical, political, and ecological conditions. Through experimental cinematography and the performative gestures of family, friends, and community members, Yoon reconnects repressed pasts with damaged presents, creating the conditions for different futures. Staging her work in charged landscapes, Yoon finds specific points of reference across multiple geopolitical contexts. In so doing, she brings worlds together, affirming the value of difference.
Over the last three decades, Jin-me Yoonʼs work has been presented internationally in hundreds of exhibitions, and she has mentored many students over the years while teaching at Simon Fraser Universityʼs School for the Contemporary Arts. In 2018, she was elected as a Fellow into the Royal Society of Canada in 2018; and in 2022, she won the prestigious Scotiabank Photography Award.
Recent monographs include Jin-me Yoon (SPA/Steidl), About Time (Vancouver Art Gallery/Hirmer) and Jin-me Yoon: Life & Work (both online & in print, Art Canada Institute).
Works:
Jin-me Yoon, Beneath, 2012
multi-channel video installation, wood and screen material, varied durations: 42:36–45:20 min.
Courtesy of the artist
Beneath navigates a low path through Vienna—between Sigmund Freud’s former home and the site of his medical practice at 19 Berggasse and Heldenplatz, the centre of the former Habsburg Empire and the site where Adolf Hitler declared the Austrian Anschluß in 1938. Yoon uses her own body as a foreign presence within the city to forge a tangible link between the psychoanalyst’s fin de siècle Vienna and the social construction and politics of present-day Vienna. While Beneath is deliberately left open to multiple references, there is a certain collapse that might be said to take place in this action, a refusal to resolve contradictions and artificially imposed boundaries between the intellectual and the visceral, the self and the other, the past and the present.
Jin-me Yoon, Dreaming Birds Know No Borders, 2021
single-channel video, colour, sound, 7:22 min.
Courtesy of the artist
In Dreaming Birds Know No Borders, a bird sanctuary on reclaimed brownfield land is connected to an estuary at the 38th parallel that divides the Korean Peninsula into North and South. Set within the unceded ancestral territory of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation, with a backdrop of the Trans-Mountain pipeline, a young man is seen moving meditatively, inspired by the traditional Korean Crane dance. This footage is intercut with images from a badly degraded VHS copy of a film made in North Korea in the 1990s about an ornithologist and his work, a man left behind when his family went South, permanently separated from them by the border of the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone). The original film score is played backwards and slowed down. Linking these two people and places, Dreaming Birds focuses on the poetic residue of longing– the unfulfilled desire to return to a place you can’t.
