Jin-me Yoon: Here Elsewhere Other Hauntings

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Jin-me Yoon, "Long view series," 2017

6 chromogenic prints, 83.3 x 141 cm eachCollection of the artist

Jin-me Yoon: Here Elsewhere Other Hauntings

Curated by Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre

Curator of Contemporary Art, Musée d’art de Joliette 

Here Elsewhere Other Hauntings is the first retrospective dedicated to the work of Jin-me Yoon, a Korean-Canadian artist living in British Columbia. Conceived and organized by the Musée d'art de Joliette, Québec, this exhibition brings together nearly 30 years of Yoon’s artistic practice through a thematic journey. It shares works that condense several of the artist's preoccupations, including her relationship with her Korean heritage, her experience of migration and colonization, and her testing of the reality of what are considered Canadian ideals.

Yoon’s early photo and video work from the 1990s, including Souvenirs of the Self (1991), employs deconstruction as a strategy to challenge how identity is formed. Drawing on what she calls “inherited representations,” she introduces clues that disrupt our perception of things and critiques our preconceptions and stereotypes of gender, motherhood, race, culture, and nationality. In the early 2000s, while continuing to develop performances for the camera, Yoon abandoned her initial position as the object of the gaze—the surface onto which others could project—to instead assert herself as the subject in the process of becoming. The video camera then became a tool to express her embodied subjectivity manifested through duration. With works like the series As It Is Becoming (2006/2008), Yoon focused her attention on Asia, making projects that examined tourism and war, which lead her to reflect on the militarization on both sides of the Pacific. These concerns, along with her own family history, affected by Japanese imperialism, further complicate her relationship to the colonialism that still affects both Canada and Korea.

Here Elsewhere Other Hauntings presents a non-chronological, thematic exploration of Yoon’s recent works, including projects made in South Korea and on Canada’s Pacific coast that exhume the memories haunting these countries’ tourist areas. By drawing on iconic landscape images popularized by the tourism industry, Yoon questions the ideological underpinnings of these types of images. Each work suggests an alternative way of transmitting history. By focusing on what has not been retained through official narratives, Yoon creates situations that emphasize the contrasts between the landscapes and the actions that take place there. She deliberately addresses sensitive subjects related to power dynamics.

Although Yoon is renowned for this aspect of her practice, this survey exhibition adds another layer to our appreciation of her work. An important leitmotif in this selection of works is the interconnectedness of human lives shown at different stages of their existence. This is expressed through images of parents in their twilight years, gestures of filial support, and a sensitivity to spirituality, death, and nature understood as a global entity that encompasses humanity. Even though these notions are universal, it is the artist herself, along with her family and those close to her, that inhabit the works, adding an emotional overtone that complicates and destabilizes the clinical aesthetic of her conceptual representations. With this choice, she reminds us that exclusion and misconceptions are not just experienced on a theoretical level, they affect real individuals and their day-to-day lives.

This exhibition is produced and circulated by the Musée d’art de Joliette. It was made possible thanks to the financial support of the Ministère de la Culture et des Communications du gouvernement du Québec and the Fondation du Musée d'art de Joliette.

Generously sponsored by Jane Irwin and Ross Hill.