About Time: Jin-Me Yoon @ The Vancouver Art Gallery
About Time presents Vancouver-based artist Jin-Me Yoon’s most significant photo, video and performance work created between 2012 and 2022. The artist explores Korean diasporic experiences in Canada as impacted by the vestiges of colonialism, imperialism and militarism. More specifically, Yoon’s poetic, cinematic aesthetics contemplate our position in the world as it is reflected in and shaped by history and memory. Within this, she creates works that speak to the unceded, ancestral lands of Indigenous Peoples.
Mul Maeum, 2022. Three-channel videos. 30:48 minutes. Photo: Kendra Lee.
Yoon’s solo exhibition takes over the entire top floor of the Vancouver Art Gallery. The spacious floor plan allows for dynamic and compelling interactions with her large-scale works. Rather than chronologically mapping her artistic trajectory, her work is curated thematically. In doing so, the exhibition demonstrates how the works reflect entangled relations between people and places across time and space.
Turning Time (Pacific Flyways), 2022. Multiple videos on Loop. Duration variable. Photo: Kendra Lee.
Certainly, one of the most exciting works in the exhibition is her 2022 video installation, Turning Time (Pacific Flyways). Hanging from the vaulted ceiling, precariously dangling above the dome, are eighteen video screens that play the video work on repeat.
Set against the Burnaby Mountains, the video captures people from the Korean-Canadian community performing a traditional, meditative crane dance. Alternating between intimate close-up and wide-angle shots, the cinematography allows one to view the dance in detail and also from a regular spectator’s perspective. Accompanying the dancers is a soundtrack mixing the natural and the industrial through the layers of birdsong construction site sounds and the echo of passing trains.
By blending these opposing forces, Yoon’s work focuses on the idea of a new generation connected to the past yet remains optimistic about the future. Specifically, this is shown by the film's location, which takes place on the unceded Tsleil-Waututh land. In strategically choosing such an enigmatic, historical setting to capture the dance, Yoon prioritises the idea of migration and the diasporic experience.
A Group for 2067 (Pacific Flyways), 2022. Inkjet Prints. Photo: Kendra Lee.
In the connecting room is A Group for 2067 (Pacific Flyways). This work is a series of inkjet prints portraying the same Korean-Canadian group featured in the above video. Yoon photographed the youths draped in vibrant Korean saekdong fabric for the photographic series. However, this costume was not chosen based on its aesthetic look - the selected colours traditionally represent survival and resilience. In these portraits, Yoon expresses her hope for the future and her vision for a new era of inclusivity for the next generation that includes land rights and ecological conscience. Presented on an expansive white wall, the curation of this work allows viewers to grasp the vibrant aesthetics of the collage and delve deeper into the poignant themes that Yoon seeks to express in her work.
Incidentally, this set of photographs refers to her iconic 1996 photographic series A Group of Sixty-Seven. This work also features members of the Korean-Canadian community. Its title strategically plays on the Canadian Group of Seven, a group of artists that significantly defined Canadian art in the early 20th Century.
Living Time 2019. Diptych Inkjet Prints. Photo: Kendra Lee.
Yoon's visual and expository work leaves much for viewers to discover. Heightened by overlapping sensory and visuals of her cinematic video and performance work, the exhibition weaves together an intricate web that interconnects her entire oeuvre throughout the years.
The themes conveyed are extensive and soul-searching, forcing viewers into critical conversations that help them to gain a politicised awareness about society and one’s physical environment. Undoubtedly a challenging feat to achieve through art. However, it is a challenge Yoon does not shy away from. That the exhibition took four years to create is a testament to this. The result is a captivating exhibit that breathes new life into Yoon’s exciting and ongoing oeuvre. Thus the exhibition successfully and effectively communicates the artist’s most important message: the importance of human connection.
About Time: Jin-Me Yoon is on view at the Vancouver Art Gallery until 5 March 2023.
References:
Vancouver Art Gallery. “Jin-Me Yoon: About Time.” Accessed January 04, 2023.
Kendra Lee
Reviews Co-Editor, MADE IN BED
