Jin-Me Yoon (born in 1960) is a

South Korea South Korea, officially the Republic of Korea (ROK), is a country in East Asia. It constitutes the southern half of the Korea, Korean Peninsula and borders North Korea along the Korean Demilitarized Zone, with the Yellow Sea to the west and t ...

n-born internationally active Canadian artist who immigrated to Canada at the age of eight. She is a contemporary visual artist, utilizing performance, photography and video to explore themes of identity as it relates to citizenship, culture, ethnicity, gender, history, nationhood and sexuality. Yoon's work is known for its use of humour and irony in its visual juxtapositions to the complex subject matter she examines. Her major works include ''Souvenirs of the Self'' (1991), a photographic series challenging stereotypical constructs of Canadian identity; ''A Group of Sixty-Seven'' (1996), consisting of sixty-seven portraits of Vancouver's Korean Canadian community standing in front of paintings by Lawren S. Harris and

Emily Carr Emily Carr (December 13, 1871 – March 2, 1945) was a Canadian artist who was inspired by the monumental art and villages of the First Nations and the landscapes of British Columbia. She also was a vivid writer and chronicler of life in her sur ...

; and ''The Dreaming Collective Knows No History'' (2006), a video installation exploring the interrelationships of body, city and history. She received her BA in Psychology from the

University of British Columbia The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a Public university, public research university with campuses near University of British Columbia Vancouver, Vancouver and University of British Columbia Okanagan, Kelowna, in British Columbia, Canada ...

in 1985, a BFA from Emily Carr College of Art in 1990, and an MFA from

Concordia University Concordia University () is a Public university, public English-language research university located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Founded in 1974 following the merger of Loyola College (Montreal), Loyola College and Sir George Williams Universit ...

in 1992. Currently she lives and works in

Vancouver, BC Vancouver is a major city in Western Canada, located in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia. As the most populous city in the province, the 2021 Canadian census recorded 662,248 people in the city, up from 631,486 in 2016. The Met ...

, and teaches as an associate professor at

Simon Fraser University Simon Fraser University (SFU) is a Public university, public research university in British Columbia, Canada. It maintains three campuses in Greater Vancouver, respectively located in Burnaby (main campus), Surrey, British Columbia, Surrey, and ...

's School for the Contemporary Arts.

Early life

Jin-me Yoon was born in

Seoul Seoul, officially Seoul Special Metropolitan City, is the capital city, capital and largest city of South Korea. The broader Seoul Metropolitan Area, encompassing Seoul, Gyeonggi Province and Incheon, emerged as the world's List of cities b ...

, South Korea, to Chung Soon Chin (Jewel) and Myung Choong Yoon (Michael). Her father relocated to Vancouver in 1966 to study Pathology, and the rest of the Yoon family joined him in 1968, shortly after the Canadian government ended decades-long immigration restrictions that discriminated on the basis of race. Yoon attended primary school in East Vancouver. During that time, she became fascinated by the photographic images of consumerism she came across in ''

National Geographic ''National Geographic'' (formerly ''The National Geographic Magazine'', sometimes branded as ''Nat Geo'') is an American monthly magazine published by National Geographic Partners. The magazine was founded in 1888 as a scholarly journal, nine ...

'', ''Reader’s Digest'', and luxury magazines that were available in the waiting room of her father's medical practice. When she was twelve, Yoon began using such images to produce collages. In high school, she learned about art history during visits to temples in Korea and in the ''Time Life Library of Art'' that her parents collected, which introduced her to the work of

Henri Matisse Henri Émile Benoît Matisse (; 31 December 1869 – 3 November 1954) was a French visual arts, visual artist, known for both his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a drawing, draughtsman, printmaking, printmaker, ...

and

Marcel Duchamp Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp (, ; ; 28 July 1887 – 2 October 1968) was a French painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, Dada, Futurism and conceptual art. He is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Pica ...

. Yoon enrolled at the

in 1978 but found the curriculum and its focus on Eurocentric, white, male narratives and creative production to be alienating. After graduating with a BA in Psychology, she earned a BFA from Emily Carr College of Art (now Emily Carr University of Art + Design) in Vancouver (1985–90), which was followed by MFA studies at Montreal’s

Work

Yoon's works often employ photography, video, and elements of performance to question constructions of identity within specific historical and social conditions. In 1991, the artist produced a work entitled ''Souvenirs of the Self'', which explores the relationship between notions of

self In philosophy, the self is an individual's own being, knowledge, and values, and the relationship between these attributes. The first-person perspective distinguishes selfhood from personal identity. Whereas "identity" is (literally) same ...

and the Other within dominant images of the Canadian landscape, most noticeably those shaped primarily by tourism. An installation created in 1998, ''between departure and arrival'', marks Yoon’s shift away from only using photographic images as outward markers of race. Using video and audio in ''departure'', Yoon investigates "interior, consciousness forming structures such as language." The unconscious, memory, history, identity, place, and nationhood are important themes for the artist, whose project, ''Unbidden'' (2004), uses multiple-channel videos and photographs to allude to the psychic and physical conditions of the subject, particularly through migration, diasporic dispersal, and displacement related to war and other geo-political conditions. Her work ''Long View'' (2017) blends photography and video to tackle themes of identity, place, history, and surveillance. The work records a performance by Yoon's family where they dig into the sand on Long Beach in

Pacific Rim National Park Reserve Pacific Rim National Park Reserve is a national park located in British Columbia, Canada, which comprises three separate regions: Long Beach, the Broken Group Islands, and the West Coast Trail. It is located in the Pacific Coast Mountains, wh ...

. ''Turning Time'' (2022) was composed of eighteen suspended digital screens projecting a diverse cast of dancers performing their own interpretation of the Korean Crane highlighting themes of interconnectedness, diasporic subjects, the future and resilience. In 2009, she was a finalist for the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Grange Prize and in 2013 was awarded a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. In 2018 she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In 2022, she won the Scotiabank Photography Award. Her recent video work explores various cities, most notably in South Korea and Japan. Formally tipping the vertical city of skyscrapers and bipedal humans onto a horizontal plane, Yoon evokes subliminal and inchoate associations with both the past and the present. For viewers experiencing the work within the gallery there is an uncanny sense of a dream-like immersion in the phantasmagoria of late modernity. In 2025, she received a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts for Artistic Achievement. Over the past fifteen years, Yoon has achieved international notoriety.

Select exhibitions

*''Jin-me-yoon: Honouring a long view'', National Gallery of Canada (2024); *''About Time'',

Vancouver Art Gallery The Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) is an art museum in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The museum occupies a adjacent to Robson Square in downtown Vancouver, making it the largest art museum in Western Canada by building size. Designed by Fr ...

(2022) *''In/Flux: Art of Korean Diaspora'',

Museum of Vancouver The Museum of Vancouver (MOV) (formerly the Vancouver Museum and prior to that the Centennial Museum) is a civic history museum located in Vanier Park, Vancouver, British Columbia. The MOV is the largest civic museum in Canada and the oldest museu ...

(2018–19) *''Through the Memory Atlas: 40 Years of Collecting,'' Kamloops Art Gallery (2018) *''Radial Change: Beginning with the Seventies,''

Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery is a contemporary art gallery in Vancouver, British Columbia, on the campus of the University of British Columbia. The gallery is housed in a building designed by architect Peter Cardew which opened in 1995 ...

, Vancouver (2018) *''Long View,'' for LandMarks 2017/Repères 2017 *''Spectral Tides'' (solo)
Nanaimo Art Gallery
(2017) *''AlterNation,'' Kamloops Art Gallery (2017) *''Photography in Canada 1960–2000,''

National Gallery of Canada The National Gallery of Canada (), located in the capital city of Ottawa, Ontario, is Canada's National museums of Canada, national art museum. The museum's building takes up , with of space used for exhibiting art. It is one of the List of large ...

(2017) *''Surveying: An Uncertain Landscape'',

Confederation Centre Art Gallery The Confederation Centre Art Gallery (CCAG; ) is an art museum that forms a part of the Confederation Centre of the Arts in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada. The art museum pavilion forms the northeast portion of the Confederation Centre ...

, Charlottetown (2015) * ''Embodied Enactments: Feminist Video Performance in Canada, 1974–2007,'' Centro Cultural Montehermoso, Vitoria, Spain (2009) * ''Passages through Phantasmagoria'', Centre Culturel Canadien/Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris (2008) * ''Jin-me Yoon: Unbidden'' (solo), organized and circulated by the Kamloops Art Gallery (2004), touring t
Oakville Galleries
(2005)

Mount St. Vincent University Mount Saint Vincent University, often referred to as the Mount, is a public, primarily undergraduate, university located in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and was established in 1873. Mount Saint Vincent offers undergraduate Arts, Science, Edu ...

Art Gallery (2005), the

, * ''Reverberations,'' Tank Loft Contemporary Art Centre, Chongqing, China (2008) * Ottawa (2006–07), and the

Southern Alberta Art Gallery The Southern Alberta Art Gallery Maansiksikaitsitapiitsinikssin (or SAAG) is a contemporary art gallery located in downtown Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada. It has three gallery spaces and a gift shop. History In 1974, local residents formed the Sout ...

, Lethbridge (2007) * ''Activating Korea,'' Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand (2007) * Feigned memories, University of Lethbridge Gallery (2003) * Lost homelands, Kamloops Art Gallery (1999) * Crossings, National Gallery of Canada (1998) * Urban Fictions, Presentation House Gallery(1997) * ''between departure and arrival'', Western Front Gallery, Vancouver (1997) * Between views, Walter Philips Gallery (1991)

Collections

Yoon's work is in the collections of the

Agnes Etherington Art Centre The Agnes Etherington Art Centre is located in Kingston, Ontario, on the campus of Queen's University. The gallery has received a number of awards for its exhibitions from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Association of Art Galleries ...

Kamloops Art GalleryOakville Galleries
Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography and

Walter Phillips Gallery The Walter Phillips Gallery (WPG) is a contemporary art gallery in Banff, Alberta. It was established in 1976 as a part of The Banff Centre in Banff National Park. History and mission Walter J. Phillips was a printmaker and painter, from the ...

, amongst others.

References

External links

Jin-Me Yoon: Life & Work
by Ming Tiampo, published by the

Art Canada Institute Art Canada Institute is a bilingual, non-profit research organization that aims to promote and support the study of Canadian art history. It has been described as “a comprehensive, multi-tiered, online-based resource for the general public on Can ...