Jin-me Yoon

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.

The entanglements in Yoon's artwork are both micro and macro. Like her camera shots, they shift scales between the personal, national, transnational, and planetary, alluding to an ethics of interconnection at every level... The parallel investigation into the logics and histories of colonialism has always been the driving force in Yoon's practice. But in her latest works, Yoon moves beyond critique and proposes new modes of being that draw from different traditions, remaking worlds that have been broken, and finding poetry in repair. - Ming Tiampo

Co-published with Scotiabank Photography Award, Toronto