Selected Works

 

Dreaming Birds Know No Borders

Untunnelling Vision

Living Time

Photographs

Living Time

Video

Turn

Long View

Photographs

Long View

Video

Testing Ground

Other Hauntings: Dance

Other Hauntings: Song

This Time Being

Beneath

Rest

Ear to Ground

Watered Ground

As It Is Becoming (Beppu, Japan)

As It Is Becoming (Seoul, Korea)

Inverted City

The Dreaming Collective Knows No History

Fugitive (Unbidden)

(it is this/it is that)

Unbidden (channel)

Welcome Stranger Welcome Home

Touring Home From Away

between departure and arrival

Intersection

A Group of Sixty-Seven

Souvenirs of the Self

 

 

Dreaming Birds Know No Borders  

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2021, Single-channel video


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 orignal film score is played backwards as well as slowed down. Linking these two people and places, Dreaming Birds focuses on the poetic residue of longing– the unfulfilled desire of returning to a place you can’t.


Dreaming Birds Know No Borders, 2021, (video excerpts: 1min 49s), single-channel 4K video, 7min 22s


Dreaming Birds Know No Borders, 2021, (video stills)

 

 

Untunnelling Vision  

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2020, Photograph and video installation


Untunnelling Vision was filmed on location on Tsuut’ina Nation land previously leased by the Canadian Armed forces base in Calgary. This land was returned to the Tsuut’ina after 100 years, partially contaminated with live munitions from ‘war-play’. Ten years later, part of this land was cleared of mines and a movie set was erected– a place reduced to rubble by war– for shooting the Canadian war film “Passchendaele.” Following the filming, the set was left in place with the intention of turning it into a tourist destination. Using 360 degree video intercut with conventional video footage, Untunnelling Vision is set in an undetermined space and time, in which the historical and entangled relations between militarism, tourism and colonialism have played out.


Untunnelling Vision, 2020, (installation view), TRUCK Contemporary Art Gallery

Untunnelling Vision, 2020, (video excerpts: 1min 44s), single channel 360 and 4k video, 21min 26s

Untunnelling Vision, 2020, (video stills)

All that is carried (Rocks and Rubble), 2020, (installation detail), styrofoam, concrete, paint, and sealant, TRUCK Contemporary Art Gallery

Other Way Through (Saekdong Skies), 2020, (installation detail), inkjet canvas and 3D printed plywood, TRUCK Contemporary Art Gallery

Untunnelling Vision (Around the Ruins), 2020, inkjet print, 51.25” x 34”

Capture (Vista): Picture in Progress, 2020, inkjet print, 57.33” x 43”

Untunnelling Vision (Upon the Wreckage), 2020, inkjet print, 51.25” x 34”

Untaken (Sky Exposure/Land Imprint), 2020, (installation view), black and white silver gelatin print (photopaper, construction site, night sky, and Dodge Ram 1500), TRUCK Contemporary Art Gallery

Untunnelling Vision (Rubble in Rubbleland), 2020, inkjet print, 26.52” x 20”

Untunnelling Vision (Rubbleland), 2020, inkjet print, 51.25” x 34”

Rubble, inkjet print, 26.24” x 21.78””

Mound, 2020, inkjet print, 23” x 18.55”

 

 

Living Time (Photographs)  

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2019, Series of 6 diptychs, 71.44 x 76.52 x 3.81 cm each



Living Time, 2019, Diptych #2, left image

 

Living Time, 2019, Diptych #2, right image

 

Living Time, 2019, (installation view), 6 diptych inkjet prints over-matted with custom Western hemlock frame, 71.44 x 76.52 x 3.81 cm each, Musée d’art de Joliette, photo credit: Paul Litherland

 

Living Time, 2019, Diptych #1

 

Living Time, 2019, Diptych #3

 

Living Time, 2019, Diptych #4

 

Living Time, 2019, Diptych #5

 

Living Time, 2019, Diptych #6

 

 

 

Living Time (Video)  

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2019, Dual-channel video, 23 min 39 s


Memories haunt the characters of Living Time. For some, events are recalled, summoned by a simple gesture that effortlessly unites the spirit of the past with the physical body of the present. For others, memories have taken corporeal form, so tangible the body is locked in the past, and the spirit of the present made to bow to it. Through the intercutting of live-action footage and archival outtakes, Living Time explores different forms of recollection and remembrance and the nested temporalities that mark all of our lives.


Living Time, 2019 (video excerpt:3min 31s), dual channel HD video, 23min 39s 

 

Living Time, 2019 and Touring Home From Away, 1998 (installation view), Musée d’art de Joliette, photo credit: Paul Litherland

 
 
 
 

Living Time, 2019 (video stills)

 

 

 

Turn  

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2019, Single-channel video, 10 min 04 s



Turn, 2019, (video still)

 

Turn, 2019, (video still)

 

Turn, 2019, (video still)

 

Turn, 2019, (video still)

 

 

 

Long View (Photographs)  

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2017, Series of 6 photographs, 83.8 x 141 cm each


In Pacific Rim National Park Reserve on Vancouver Island, a hole is dug to unearth the layers of meaning—historical, touristic, emotional—sedimented in the memories so often muted by the beauty of open ocean and the endless horizon.


Long View, 2017, (installation view), 6 framed chromogenic prints, 83.8 x 141 cm each, Nanaimo Art Gallery, photo credit: Sean Fenzl

 

Long View #1, 2017
 

 

Long View #2, 2017
 

 

Long View #3, 2017
 

 

Long View #4, 2017
 

 

Long View #5, 2017
 

 

Long View #6, 2017
 

 

Long View, 2017, (postcard project), six perforated colour postcards, 10.1 X 15.2 cm each

 

 

 

Long View (Video)  

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2017, Single-channel video, 10 min 04 s


Long View explores the historical, military, and personal threads that connect geographies on the Pacific Rim. All the characters in Long View regularly stop to scan the horizon, perhaps watching for potential threats, or simply letting their gaze drift longingly across the ocean to coasts on the other side of the Pacific. But when they dig a hole on the beach and the anonymous black-clad figure amongst them disappears into it, a different temporality takes hold. Archival images, dizzying camera movements and experimental sound signal a passage to an interior, memory-based reality. Past, present, and future; here and there; then and now are all caught in an undertow, swirling together in a disorienting montage that brings the site’s histories to the surface.


Long View, 2017, (video excerpts: 1min 27s), single-channel HD video, 10min 03s

 

Long View, 2017, (installation view), Nanaimo Art Gallery, photo credit: Sean Fenzl

 

Long View, 2017, (video still)

 

Long View, 2017, (video still)

 

Long View, 2017, (video still)

 

Long View, 2017, (video still)

 

 

 

Testing Ground   

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2019, Single-channel video, 9 min 29 s


Testing Ground was filmed on Long Beach, in Vancouver Island’s Pacific Rim National Park Reserve. Set against the background of the Pacific Ocean, soldiers move mechanically on the beach, suddenly multiplying like a colony of ants. When they abruptly disappear, they leave behind a few casual strollers along the water’s edge. The film is marked by an incongruity between the soldiers’ determined movements and the banal motions of ordinary passers-by, as if the scene is haunted by a restless memory. And in fact, it is: this same area was once used as a practice target for bombings, and while the Yuułuʔiłʔatḥ and t̓ukʷaaʔatḥ knows this land's history well, the touristic tide has washed away its traces.

- Anne-Marie St Jean-Aubere


Testing Ground, 2019, (installation view), Musée d'art contemporain des Laurentides, photo credit: Lucien Lisabelle

 

Testing Ground, 2019, (video still)

 

Testing Ground, 2019, (video still)

 

Testing Ground, 2019, (video still)

 

 

 

Other Hauntings (Dance)   

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2016, Single-channel video, 8 min 15 s


Since 2007 a community of activists on Jejudo have vigorously opposed the construction of a naval base on a 1.2 km coastal lava rock called Gureombi, located near the village of Gangjeong… Sitting on a bench, a woman tells a story using her entire body as a map. Her dynamic gestures betray her background as a dancer, but she is not here to dance. She is a dedicated activist named Tera, who describes Gureombi and, through her words and gestures, becomes the rock. She argues that while the surface is broken, and the military base has been built, Gureombi is not completely destroyed; it remains alive underneath. As she speaks, an apparition in camouflage fatigues and long seaweed hair fades into view. This uncanny military presence takes over, but does not completely eclipse her. Like Gureombi she is lost from view, but she continues to have a voice.

– Jesse Birch


Other Hauntings (Dance), 2016 (video excerpt: 1min 04s), single-channel HD video, 8min 15s

 

Other Hauntings (Dance), 2016, (video still)

 

Other Hauntings (Dance), 2016, (video still)

 

Other Hauntings (Dance), 2016, (installation view), Nanaimo Art Gallery, photo credit: Sean Fenzl

 

 

 

Other Hauntings (Song)   

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2016, Single-channel video, 7 min 20 s


On Jejudo, the largest South Korean island protesters are not only against the increased military presence in the region, but also the destruction of the rock form called Gureombi: a sacred community prayer site, and an ecologically sensitive area containing fresh water springs and hundreds of animal and plant species… A trail system that once provided access to the entirety of the rock, now leads to a tiny remaining strip of Gureombi between the military base and a nearby resort. Community activists have remained vigilant to keep this small part of the rock safe from encroachment on either side. One of these activists is a catholic priest named Father Mun, who is a leading voice against the United States military presence in South Korea. Each day he sings a simple protest song to the military base that goes: 'Peace, Gangjeong, Gureombi, our love.'

Yoon’s camera follows a young man from Jejudo up the trail, past tourists and resort workers, to an outcrop where he too sings Father Mun’s song. But instead of singing to the remaining exposed part of Gureombi, he bypasses the concrete layer of militarism, and through an improvised device sings beneath the waves to a part of the rock that is only affected by geologic time.

– Jesse Birch


Other Hauntings (Song), 2016 (video excerpt: 1min 44s), single-channel HD video, 7min 32s

 

Other Hauntings (Song), 2019, (video still)

 

Other Hauntings (Song), 2016 (installation view), Nanaimo Art Gallery, photo credit: Sean Fenzl

 

 

 

This Time Being   

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2013, Series of 9 chromogenic prints, 45.72 x 55.88 cm, framed: 63.18 x 74.14 cm


In this series of sculptural portraits, Yoon turns to the non-human world to reimagine relationality. A soft rubber sculpture is draped, hung, and propped in a variety of man-made natural environments, allegorizing dependency, interrelationality, and form. Creating a poetics of contingency, the works in the series This Time Being imagine a post-Anthropocene world in which humans rethink their primacy in the world. Yoon’s most abstract, formal work, This Time Being is an important highlight in her oeuvre, which indicates the central importance of constructed form in her work.

- Ming Tiampo


This Time Being, #1, 2013

This Time Being, #2, 2013

This Time Being, #3, 2013

This Time Being, #4, 2013

This Time Being, #5, 2013

This Time Being, #6, 2013

This Time Being, #7, 2013

This Time Being, #8, 2013

This Time Being, #9, 2013

 

 

Beneath   

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2012, Multi-channel video installation


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.

- Vancouver Art Gallery


Beneath, 2012, (installation view), multi-channel video installation, wood, glass, mirrors, steel, and bricks, dimensions variable, video duration various: 42:36 min to 45:20, Vancouver Art Gallery

 

Beneath, 2012, (installation detail)

 

Beneath, 2012, (installation detail)

 

 

 

Rest   

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2012, Chromogenic print, 148.6 x 121.92 cm



Rest, 2012

 

 

 

Ear to Ground   

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2008, Single-channel video


Jin-me Yoon examines our larger metaphysical relationship to the world through the embodiment of a distorted phantom figure who subjugates human-centric verticality by crawling on the horizontal plane amidst thermal hot-spring sites in Japan that are communally shared.

- Catriona Jeffries Gallery


Ear to Ground, 2012, (installation detail), Catriona Jeffries Gallery

 

Ear to Ground, 2012, (video stills)

 

 

 

Watered Ground   

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2008, Single-channel video


Water’s powerful ability to soothe both body and mind, thanks to its mineral properties, has made Beppu’s hot springs, especially those in the Kannawa District, a favourite healing place for the Japanese. After the Second World War, the city opened treatment centres to deal with the effects of the atomic bomb, taking full advantage of the region’s exceptional location on top of a geothermal hot spot. In this video, this humble communal outdoor bath is an inviting, relaxing environment where people can take a moment for themselves as well as socialize. Men and women occupy separate bathing periods, however the artist, a Korean woman, bathes with Japanese men. This innocuous gesture is one of monumental significance considering the sexual exploitation of Korean women—the history of comfort women —for example. The quiet coexistence of bodies in this context suggests a different path towards healing and reconciliation.

- Anne-Marie St Jean-Aubere


Ear to Ground, 2012, (installation detail), Catriona Jeffries Gallery

 

Watered Ground, 2008 (video still)

 

 

 

As It Is Becoming (Beppu, Japan)   

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2008, Multi-channel video installation


The body, any body, walking through space has an associational field of meanings constituted through the relation of that body to its environment. These meanings, which include those of history, are considered to be stable or fixed. In response to this fixity, the artist has been experimenting with displacing the vertical, bi-pedal way we typically move through the world by giving it a horizontal orientation. Lying on a moving platform, Yoon performs lateral explorations (“crawling”) for the camera first through the city of her birth in As It Is Becoming (Seoul, Korea). She has performed similar actions in other towns and sites that differ in their geography, history and culture, performing acts of memorialization that nevertheless evade monumentalization. To date these cities and towns include: Seoul, Vienna, Vancouver, Beppu, Mexico City, and Nagoya.


As It Is Becoming (Beppu, Japan): Former U.S. Army Base, 2008, (video still)

 

As It Is Becoming (Beppu, Japan): Former U.S. Army Base, 2008, (installation view), single channel video, 14:23, Catriona Jeffries Gallery

 

 

 

As It Is Becoming (Seoul, Korea)   

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2008, Multi-channel video installation


In these lateral explorations, displacement is catalyzed as an artistic strategy causing these artworks to operate differently than a typical memorial: while a monument links an artwork directly and instrumentally to a historical event, in Yoon’s experiments, these links are indirect, requiring an artwork to pass through multiple and open-ended associations first. These associations are both historically concrete and abstract. Many of the sites in Seoul chosen by the artist have historical or personal significance. Thus the artist considers her works as a form of ephemeral and embodied commemoration of what bodies have endured, and often continue to endure, historically and at this present moment.


As It Is Becoming (Seoul, Korea), 2008/2019, (installation view: Musée d'art contemporain des Laurentides), multi-channel video installation, dimensions variable, durations various: 2:12 to 5:57, photo credit: Lucien Lisabelle

 

As It Is Becoming (Seoul, Korea), 2008, (video stills)

 

 

 

Inverted City   

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2008, single-channel video, 5 min 12 s



Inverted City, 2006, (video still)

 

 

 

The dreaming collective knows no history
(US Embassy to Japanese Embassy, Seoul)   

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2006, Single-channel video


The dreaming collective knows no history (U.S. Embassy to Japanese Embassy, Seoul) extends Yoon's interest in the interrelationship between the built environment of the city, history and the body. The first part of the title makes reference to Walter Benjamin’s suggestion that modernity and the flows of history are phantasmagoric. The second part of the title refers to the performance for the video on the street moving from the U.S. Embassy to the Japanese Embassy in Seoul. Formally tipping the vertical city of skyscrapers and bipedal humans onto a horizontal plane, alludes to the simultaneously submissive and subversive possibilities of this inversion. Rife in historical and contemporary references and associations, the smooth flows of progress and power as well as the frantic pace of production and consumption are interrupted.


The dreaming collective knows no history (US Embassy to Japanese Embassy, Seoul), 2006, (video still)

 

The dreaming collective knows no history (US Embassy to Japanese Embassy, Seoul), 2006, (video still)

 

The dreaming collective knows no history (US Embassy to Japanese Embassy, Seoul), 2006, (video still)

 

 

 

Fugitive (Unbidden)   

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2004


This transitional work features Yoon as a black-clad figure evocative of Hollywood ninjas or Viet Cong prowling through bamboo groves in Pioneer Park, Kamloops BC. These works were created in response to the 50th anniversary of the Korean War armistice, and explored how intergenerational histories of war are carried in the body. As such, the work operates on multiple levels. Firstly, it identifies the stereotypes imposed on Asian-Canadians and Asian Americans through popular culture, and explores how Asian subjects are constituted through one-dimensional portrayals in the media. Secondly, the work evokes the histories of war carried by Asian bodies and memories across oceans and continents before resettlement in Canada. Finally, put in relation to other histories of war and colonialism in the context of immigration to Canada, Unbidden speaks to the bodies unbidden to this land in order to evoke the power of solidarity and multidirectional memory.

- Ming Tiampo


Fugitive (Unbidden), 2004, (installation view, National Gallery of Canada)

 

Fugitive (Unbidden), #3, 2004, chromogenic print, 99.5 X 99.5 cm

 

Fugitive (Unbidden), #5, 2004, 1 of 3 in a series chromogenic print, 76.2 X 76.2 cm

 

 

 

(it is this/it is that)   

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2004, Photograph Diptych, 74 x 126 cm each



(it is this/it is that), 2004/2018, (installation view), 2 chromogenic prints with overlam and acrylic surface mount, 74 x 126 cm each, photo credit: Rachel Topham

 

(it is this/it is that), 2004/2018, (detail view), 2 chromogenic prints with overlam and acrylic surface mount, 74 x 126 cm each, photo credit: Rachel Topham

 

 

 

Unbidden (Channel)   

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2003, Single-channel video, 11 min 11 s


A figure dressed in traditional Korean clothing floats in what appears to be a river, perhaps the Han, but is in fact Paul Lake, near Kamloops BC. Two places merge into one, condensing several stories that follow the flow of memory. The body lies suspended, sinking then reappearing periodically to the rhythm of the water that sometimes submerges it completely. The play of superimposition and transparency creates the illusion of a ghostly presence, an intangible body on the edge of the visible and the invisible, of dreams and reality. Is this woman simply in repose? Or is her body a corpse drifting toward its final resting place?

- Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre


Unbidden (Channel), 2003, (video still)

 

Unbidden (Channel), 2003, (installation view), photo credit: Lucien Lisabelle

 

 

 

Welcome Stranger Welcome Home   

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2002, Single-channel video, 8 min 46 s


In Welcome Stranger Welcome Home the central figure becomes a kind of avatar, a digital stand-in that travels through artificial worlds. Given that her role-playing presence is nonetheless the most stable element within this spectacle [the Calgary Stampede Parade], the piece seems to hold hybrid or unfixed identity as a fundamental condition (or maybe survival strategy) of places constructed in the cultural imaginary - such as the anachronism of a contemporary Canadian Wild West.

- Germaine Koh


Welcome Stranger Welcome Home, 2002, (video still)

 

Welcome Stranger Welcome Home, 2002, (installation view)

 

 

 

Touring Home From Away   

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1998, 9 diptychs, 81 x 66 x 13 cm each


The nine diptychs comprising Touring Home From Away are presented in double-sided lightboxes that resemble advertising panels. Created in Prince Edward Island, whose economy is based mainly on agriculture and tourism, the images create an entwined narrative that explores not only the island’s iconic sites and features—the house of the main fictional character in the novel Anne of Green Gables, a lighthouse, a potato field with its furrows of red earth—but also generic, everyday places: a convenience store, a Tim Hortons, an amusement park, and a superstore. The combination of these two types of imagery, staged photographs and imitations of family snapshots, undermines the idyllic portrait promoted by the tourism industry. By presenting the works recto-verso, the artist literally shows both sides of the images, playing on reversal to disrupt the narrative and reveal what often remains unseen.


Touring Home From Away, 1998, 1 of 9 diptychs (front)

 

Touring Home From Away, 1998, 1 of 9 diptychs (reverse)

 

Touring Home From Away, 1998, (installation view, Musée d’art de Joliette), nine black anodized, double-sided lightboxes, 18 Ilfochrome translucent prints with polyester overlam, 81 x 66 x 13 cm each, photo credit: Paul Litherland

 

Touring Home From Away, 1998, 1 of 9 diptychs (front)

 

Touring Home From Away, 1998, 1 of 9 diptychs (reverse)

 

 

 

between departure and arrival   

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1997, Two-channel video installation,
print on mylar scroll, variable dimensions, 9 min 51 s


Between Departure and Arrival was Yoon’s first video work, and marked her entry into a practice which began to explore duration, time, history, and memory through the poetics of displacement. The relationship between history and the present moment is underscored through her use of archival film, taken from British Columbia’s provincial archives. Juxtaposing clips of Asian immigrants in Canada’s history with footage of clouds, as if seen from an airplane window, the work examines the deep and difficult history of Asian immigrants in Canada. Created in 1997, the year of the Hong Kong handover to China and a period of rising anti-Asian sentiment focussed on “monster homes” and who had the naturalized right to own land, Between Departure and Arrival probed questions of belonging, migration, and the complexities of national identity.

- Ming Tiampo


between departure and arrival, 1997/2019, (installation view, Musée d’art de Joliette), photo credit: Paul Litherland

 

between departure and arrival, 1997/2019, (installation detail, Musée d’art de Joliette), photo credit: Paul Litherland

 

between departure and arrival, 1997/2019, (installation detail, Musée d’art de Joliette), photo credit: Paul Litherland

 

 

 

Intersection   

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1997 - , Ongoing photo and video series


Yoon interrogates the maternal subject in this series, which will especially resonate well with mothers balancing work and child care in the midst of a pandemic. Set against richly coloured backgrounds that refer to advertising, Yoon’s use of “blatant artifice” addresses an important early context for her work—Vancouver photoconceptualism. Critically engaging with other predominantly masculinist practices—Abstract Expressionist drip painting, post-Duchampian practices and performance through a nod to Bruce Nauman’s Self Portrait as Fountain (1966)—Yoon asks: Can artist be both culturally productive and biologically reproductive? Can a racialized, feminist subject be an art historical subject?

- Ming Tiampo


Intersection 1, 1996, (installation view), transmounted C-prints, 98 x 141 cm each

 

Intersection 1, 1996, (detail left panel)

 

Intersection 1, 1996, (detail right panel)

 

Intersection 2, 1998, (detail left panel), two C-prints, 109.2 x 143.5 cm each

 

Intersection 2, 1998, (detail right panel)

 

Intersection 3, 2001, (detail left panel), two C-prints, 161 x 207 cm each

 

Intersection 3, 2001, (detail right panel)

 

Intersection 4, 2001, (installation view), three single channel video projections, dimensions variable

 

Intersection 5, 2001, (detail left panel), two C-prints, 161 x 207 cm each

 

Intersection 5, 2001, (detail right panel)

 

 

 

A Group of Sixty-Seven   

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1996, Two grids of 67 framed c-prints, for a total of 135 c-prints, 47.5 x 60.5 cm each


Perhaps Yoon’s most iconic work, A Group of Sixty-Seven established Yoon’s position as a Vancouver photographer making conceptual interventions into the History of Art and representations of the nation. For this work, Yoon invited 67 members of the Korean-Canadian community to 3 separate Korean dinners at the Vancouver Art Gallery exhibition Art for a Nation. During that dinner, Yoon’s first experiment at the borderlands of conceptual photography and social practice, Yoon led a discussion about experiences of racism in Canada, and symbolically took formal portraits of all participants against two monuments of Canadian landscape painting in the VAG’s collection: Lawren Harris, Maligne Lake, Jasper Park (1924), and Emily Carr, Old Time Coastal Village (1924-30). Through these obviously constructed photographs (signalled through formal repetition), Yoon denaturalizes Harris and Carr’s colonial gazes on the landscape, the assumed disjuncture between immigrants of colour and that landscape, as well as the presumed documentary nature of the photograph itself. 1967 marked 100 years of confederation and the year restrictions were lifted on East Asian immigration to Canada.

- Ming Tiampo


A Group of Sixty-Seven, 1996 (detail)

 

A Group of Sixty-Seven, 1996 (detail)

 

A Group of Sixty-Seven, 1996/2018 (installation view, Museum of Vancouver), photo credit: Rachel Topham

 

A Group of Sixty-Seven, 1996 (detail)

 

A Group of Sixty-Seven, 1996 (detail)

 

A Group of Sixty-Seven, 1996 (detail)

 

A Group of Sixty-Seven, 1996 (detail)

 

A Group of Sixty-Seven, 1996 (detail)

 

A Group of Sixty-Seven, 1996 (detail)

 

 

 

Souvenirs of the Self   

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1991, Series of 6 photographs


A set of six postcards that featured her wearing a Nordic sweater and jeans posing in front of a museum vitrine, a tour bus, Lake Louise, and other tourist sites, this series plays on the discomfort that her racialized body inserts into the national narratives staged in these postcards. With witty, ironic text on the postcard backs, Yoon unravels those narratives, and interrogates the representational claims made by museums, the tourist industry and photography itself, prompting the viewer to ask themselves who is Canadian? Whose land is this? As Monika Kin Gagnon writes, 'who is the rightful and naturalized national subject, especially given the ongoing history of colonization vis à vis the First Nations peoples?'

- Ming Tiampo


Souvenirs of the Self (Lake Louise), 1991/2019, (detail), inkjet print on laminated polyester, 185.4 x 121.9 cm

 

Souvenirs of the Self (Banff Park Museum), 1991-2000, c-print on plexiglas, 243.8 cm x 182.9 cm

 

Souvenirs of the Self (postcard project), 1991, six perforated colour postcards, each 15.2 X 10.1 cm