Covering over 30 years of artistic practice, this book celebrates the complex yet highly distilled photographs of Jin-me Yoon’s dynamic vision. Showcasing a camera that is a witness to performative acts occurring both inside and outside the frame, the book reveals how Yoon has expanded conceptualist understandings of image-making and contributed to ongoing discussions of place and identity. In doing so, this volume illustrates how she uses the inherent mobility of images and the forces of diasporic thinking to bring disparate worlds together in poetic relation and create conditions for a different future.

Featured works include Fugitive (Unbidden) (2004), which calls up stereotypes imposed on Asian Canadians and Asian Americans through popular culture in the context of intergenerational histories of war; and Long Time So Long (2022), in which, wearing traditional Korean masks that have been fused with ubiquitous emojis, Yoon performs against the background of an industrial waste plant that is also a natural bird habitat, to reimagine new ways of being in relation to nature and one another.

Co-published with Scotiabank Photography Award, Toronto

 

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-Waututh Nations. Since the early nineties she has used photography, video, performance and installation to explore the entangled global relations of tourism, militarism and colonialism. Yoon’s award-winning, experimentally-driven practice has been exhibited widely and collected internationally. Professor of Visual Arts at Simon Fraser University, Yoon was recognized for her research contributions in the field of art when in 2018 she was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a council of distinguished Canadian scholars, scientists and artists.

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