Image: Installation View of JIn-me Yoon: Long Time So Long, 2023, exhibition at the Art Gallery at Evergreen. Photo: Rachel Topham Photography.
Jin-me Yoon: Long Time So Long
February 18 – April 30, 2023
The Art Gallery at Evergreen premiered 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 combined 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 surrounded 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.
This exhibition was part of the 2023 Capture Photography Festival Selected Exhibition Program. The artist acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council supported by the Province of British Columbia.
Jin-me Yoon: Long Time So Long
윤진미: 롱타임 쏘 롱
2023년 2월 18일 부터 4월 30일까지
애버그린 아트 갤러리는 밴쿠버를 거점으로 활동중인 한국계 작가 윤진미의 최신작을 모아 <Jin-me Yoon: Long Time So Long 윤진미: 롱타임 쏘 롱> 전시회를 개최합니다. 윤진미는 1990년대초부터 사진, 비디오, 퍼포먼스 등을 소재로 그녀의 개인적 이주의 경험을 역사적, 정치적, 생태학적 상황들과 연계시키는 작업을 해왔습니다. 코로나 팬데믹이 초래한 강제적 고립과 느리고 둔감해진 시간성의 자각, 이와 더불어 최근 다시 일고 있는 아시아인들을 향한 인종차별에 대한 작가의 고찰은 그녀의 최신작에서 휴식, 치유, 그리고 서로의 다름을 보듬어주기라는 형식으로 이어집니다. 사진, 비디오, 사운드가 한데 어우러진 이번 전시는 팬데믹에 대처하는 공동 방안을 이산(디아스포라)의 관점에서 함께 모색하는 의미있는 만남이 될 것입니다. 이 지역 한국계 청년들의 음성이 빚어내는 소리의 향연이 24 채널 오디오 설치 작업을 통해 전시공간을 가득 메우고, 함께 전시된 사진 작품들과 비디오는 관객들에게 색다른 느낌으로 다가옵니다. 윤진미는 오랜 세월동안 그녀의 마음속 잔상으로 남아있던 꿈결 같은 기억에서 착안한 한국 전통 민속 무용에서 쓰인 탈과 이모티콘을 연상시키는 도상학적 이미지를 통해 저항 정신을 그려내고 있습니다. 이러한 맥락속에서 구현된 작품들은 신령스럽고, 해학적이면서도 때론 베일에 싸인 듯, 그러면서도 적나라하게 우리가 처한 현실이 지닌 어려움과 잠재성을 표현합니다.
About Jin-me Yoon
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.
