Image: Jin-me Yoon, Untitled 3 (Long Time So Long), 2022. Inkjet Print, 139.7 x 111.8 cm. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Rachel Topham Photography.

February 18 – April 30, 2023

The Art Gallery at Evergreen is pleased to premiere Jin-me Yoon: Long Time So Long, a new body of multimedia work by acclaimed Korean-born, Vancouver-based artist Jin-me Yoon. Since the early ’90s, Yoon has used photography, video and performance to situate her personal experience of migration in relation to unfolding historical, political and ecological conditions. Responding to the forced isolation and slow, interior sense of time created by the pandemic as well as the effects of the rise in East Asian racism, the artist’s new works focus on rest, repair and coming together in difference.

The exhibition combines photography, video and sound to explore our collective grappling with the pandemic, from a diasporic perspective. Centring the voices of local youth of Korean ancestry, a twenty-four-channel soundscape fills the gallery with their collective humming. The photographs and video that surround the audio installation take on a different register. Starting from a dream—seen both awake and asleep—Yoon uses iconography derived from emojis as well as Talchum masks, which are used in Korean folk dance, to find a place for traditions of resistance. The resulting works, at once haunting and humorous, exposed and veiled, grapple with the potentials and challenges of expressing the strangeness of our current moment.  

About the Artist 

Jin-me Yoon is a Korean-born, Vancouver-based artist situated on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Wauthuth Nations whose work explores the entangled relations of tourism, militarism, and colonialism. Since the early ’90s, 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 Yoon’s work has been presented internationally in hundreds of exhibitions, and she has mentored many students over the years while teaching at Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts, Vancouver. In 2018, she was elected as a Fellow into the Royal Society of Canada, and, in 2022, she won the prestigious Scotiabank Photography Award. 

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Situated on the shores of Lafarge Lake in Town Centre Park, Evergreen Cultural Centre (ECC) exists on the unceded, traditional and ancestral core territory of the kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem) First Nation, which lies within the shared territories of the səli̓lwətaɁɬ təməxʷ (Tsleil-Waututh), S’ólh Téméxw (Stó:lō), qiqéyt (Qayqayt) and sq̓əc̓iy̓aɁɬ təməxʷ (Katzie), xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam) and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish) nations in the region known today as the Tri-Cities.