Jin-me Yoon facts for kids

Jin-Me Yoon (born 1960) is a talented Canadian artist. She was born in South Korea and moved to Canada when she was eight years old. Jin-Me Yoon creates art using photography, video, and performances. Her art often explores big ideas about who we are. She looks at how our identity connects to our country, culture, background, and history.

Yoon's artwork often uses humor and unexpected pairings of images. This helps her explore tricky topics in a fresh way. Some of her famous works include:

• Souvenirs of the Self (1991): A photo series that questions common ideas about what it means to be Canadian.
• A Group of Sixty-Seven (1996): This work features 67 portraits of Korean Canadians from Vancouver. They stand in front of paintings by famous Canadian artists Lawren S. Harris and Emily Carr.
• The Dreaming Collective Knows No History (2006): A video art piece that looks at how our bodies, cities, and history are all connected.

Jin-Me Yoon studied at several universities. She earned a degree in Psychology from the University of British Columbia in 1985. She then studied art at Emily Carr College of Art (1990) and Concordia University (1992). Today, she lives and works in Vancouver, BC. She also teaches art as a professor at Simon Fraser University.

Jin-Me Yoon's Early Life

Jin-Me Yoon was born in Seoul, South Korea. Her parents were Chung Soon Chin and Myung Choong Yoon. In 1966, her father moved to Vancouver to study medicine. The rest of the Yoon family joined him in 1968. This was after Canada changed its immigration rules. Before, these rules had been unfair to people based on their race.

Yoon went to primary school in East Vancouver. During this time, she became very interested in photos of products and ads. She saw these images in magazines like National Geographic and Reader’s Digest. These magazines were in her father's medical office waiting room. When she was twelve, Yoon started making collages using these pictures.

In high school, she learned about art history. She visited temples in Korea and read her parents' Time Life Library of Art books. These books showed her the art of famous artists like Henri Matisse and Marcel Duchamp. In 1978, Yoon started at the University of British Columbia (UBC). However, she felt that the art classes focused too much on European male artists. After getting her psychology degree, she went to art school. She earned a BFA from Emily Carr College of Art in Vancouver. Later, she got her MFA from Concordia University in Montreal.

What Jin-Me Yoon's Art Explores

Jin-Me Yoon's art often uses photos, videos, and performances. She uses these to question how we understand identity. She looks at how identity is shaped by history and society.

In 1991, she created Souvenirs of the Self. This artwork explores how we see ourselves and others. It looks at how Canadian landscapes, especially those used for tourism, shape these ideas. Important topics for Yoon include memory, history, identity, and nationhood. Her recent project, Unbidden, uses multiple videos and photos. It explores how people feel and live, especially when they move to new places. This includes people who have moved because of war or other big world events.

In 1998, Yoon created between departure and arrival. This work showed a change in her art. She started to move beyond just using photos to show race. In departure, she used video and audio. She wanted to explore deeper parts of our minds, like how language shapes our thoughts.

Jin-Me Yoon has received many awards for her work:

• In 2009, she was a finalist for the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Grange Prize.
• In 2013, she won a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship.
• In 2018, she became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
• In 2022, she won the Scotiabank Photography Award.

Her recent video art explores different cities, especially in South Korea and Japan. She often turns the view of tall city buildings and people on their side. This makes viewers feel like they are dreaming. It connects them to both the past and the present in a unique way. Over the last fifteen years, Jin-Me Yoon has become well-known around the world.

Where You Can See Her Art

Jin-Me Yoon's art has been shown in many important exhibitions:

• Jin-me-yoon: Honouring a long view, National Gallery of Canada (2024)
• About Time, Vancouver Art Gallery (2022)
• In/Flux: Art of Korean Diaspora, Museum of Vancouver (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, 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 (2017)
• Surveying: An Uncertain Landscape, Confederation Centre Art Gallery, 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 to Oakville Galleries (2005) Mount St. Vincent University Art Gallery (2005), the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2006–07), and the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge (2007)
• Reverberations, Tank Loft Contemporary Art Centre, Chongqing, China (2008)
• Activating Korea, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand (2007)
• between departure and arrival, Western Front Gallery, Vancouver (1997)

Art Collections

You can find Jin-Me Yoon's artwork in many important art collections. These include the Vancouver Art Gallery, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, and the National Gallery of Canada. Her work is also at the Kamloops Art Gallery, Oakville Galleries, Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, and Walter Phillips Gallery.