Jin-Me Yoon

Jin-Me Yoon

Suzanne Sontag was against photography because it has no history, no narrative , Sontage never met Jin-Me Yoon. Her work is based around history and cultural identity with the use of landscapes “In paying attention to my life, I find that what may appear to be personal narratives, in fact, implicate larger social and historical considerations”*1. As a Canadian artist, she exhibited widely over our country but also in The United States, Japan, Turkey and Korea. She now teaches visual arts at Simon Fraser University in   Contemporary Arts.  

First of all Yoon’s work clearly shows her interest in national and cultural identity in “ A Group Of Sixty Seven “ (1996) (picture #1). It was made in 1996 and it makes reference to the year 1967 when immigration restrictions were lifted concerning Asian nationals. Yoon’s father was already in Canada studying and when those restrictions were lifted. She was able with her mother and siblings to join him here.   Yoon said “ It’s not really about the Korean Canadian subjects questioning their belonging to Canada, but more a fundamental question about how do we image belonging in Canada? “*1.

If we look at this work more closely, we can see that the backgrounds of both works of “A Group Of Sixty-seven” are landscapes. They are in fact a Lawrence Harris’s painting (“one of the best known Canadian Artist” *2) and a Emily Carr’s. Both artists had an impact on the issue of national identity in art history.   She invited sixty-seven members of Vancouver’s Korean community to be photographed looking out from Harris’s Maligne Lake, Jasper Park and then they were looking at Carr’s Old Time Coast Village ( picture #1) . These juxtaposition of those Canadian’s landscape and the photographed of Korean people makes us wonder if those two belong together and the question of national identity comes back to place.

The other work I am going to look at is the series of “ Souvenirs Of The Self”(picture...