Jin-me Yoon: Life & Work

How can we move away from colonial ways of being? How do we create communities where sustainable relationships with our environment exist? How can we build a more equitable world? For over thirty years, these profound questions have been at the core of Korean Canadian artist Jin-me Yoon’s (b.1960) pioneering practise. Since the beginning of her career, she has explored identity in national and global contexts, drawing on her childhood in Korea and her experiences of immigration and migration to build an internationally acclaimed practice.

 

In Jin-me Yoon: Life & Work, Ming Tiampo reveals how Yoon’s multidisciplinary art—which includes photography, video, performances, and installations—reconnects troubled pasts with damaged presents and offers hope for a better future. It considers how one of Canada’s most important voices on the nature of identity developed a critical perspective on the representation of this country in museums, art history, the tourist industry, and monuments with groundbreaking works such as Souvenirs of the Self, 1991, and Group of Sixty-Seven, 1996, projects that, as Tiampo notes, have become “canonical touchstones in the public articulation of Canadian identity and race.”

 

Provocative and essential to understanding current conversations about building a more just and sustainable world, this title reveals how Yoon plays a pivotal role in global contemporary art from Canada that addresses urgent issues that arise out of migration, colonization, and extractive economies. Yoon, who is the recipient of the 2022 Scotiabank Photography Award and the subject of a 2023 major exhibition organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery, is changing conversations for a generation of Canadians. Jin-me Yoon: Life & Work is the first critical biography to explore her singular oeuvre.

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