Jin-me Yoon: Selector's Statement
Jin-me Yoon’s photographic and video-installation works pivot on explorations of identity and place that the artist links to her autobiographical experiences of moving to Canada from South Korea at the age of eight.
Whether photographing herself in postcard-like vignettes of Canada’s scenic Rocky Mountains, or making multiple-channel videos of a black-clothed figure crawling through the cityscapes of Seoul, Korea, Yoon asks the viewer to contemplate the question of “how do we belong?” In so doing, her photographic practice cuts to the heart of the Canadian experience of hybridity, in which the mixing of cultures produces an acute awareness of living “in-between” worlds. By inserting the sole figure into landscapes and city streets, Yoon fractures the image to evoke this “in-between” experience of identity. From the rent in the image, another place within representation emerges: one in which traces of history and flashes of memory, longing and gesture converge.
