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How can we move away from colonial ways of being? How do we create communities where sustainable relationships with our environment exist? How can we build a more equitable world? For over thirty years, these profound questions have been at the core of Korean Canadian artist Jin-me Yoon's (b.1960) groundbreaking work. Since the beginning of her career, she has explored questions of identity in national and global contexts, drawing on her experiences of immigration and migration to build an internationally acclaimed practice.
In
Jin-me Yoon: Life & Work, Ming Tiampo reveals how Yoon's multidisciplinary art-which includes photography, video, performance, and installation-reconnects troubled pasts with damaged presents to create the conditions for a better future. This new title considers how one of Canada's most important voices developed a critical perspective on the dissemination of national narratives through tourism and art history with iconic works such as
Souvenirs of the Self, 1991, and
A Group of Sixty-Seven, 1996, which, as Tiampo notes, have become "canonical touchstones in the public articulation of Canadian identity and race."
Yoon's earliest works questioned the construction of self and other, unpacking stereotypical assumptions and dominant discourses on gender and sexuality, culture and ethnicity, and citizenship and nationhood. Adopting a wider and wider lens over time, her recent works investigate entangled global relations of colonialism, tourism, and militarism, unearthing difficult histories and connecting them to our present circumstances. Ultimately, her stirring art asks us to reimagine our relationships to each other and to the planet in order to build more hopeful futures.
About the author
Ming Tiampo is Professor of Art History and co-director of the Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis at Carleton University. A specialist in transnational modernisms, she is interested in the histories of our globally entangled present. Tiampo's major publications and curatorial projects include
Gutai: Decentering Modernism (University of Chicago Press, 2011) and
Gutai: Splendid Playground, co-curated at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (2013).
