The Polygon Gallery celebrates Jin-me Yoon, recipient of the 2022 Scotiabank Photography Prize, with a book launch for her new major monograph published by Steidl. Join us for a conversation between the artist and The Polygon Gallery Curator Elliott Ramsey, followed by a wine reception and book signing. Copies of Jin-me Yoon’s new book will be available for purchase at a special price.
Doors 6:30pm
About The Artist
Jin-me Yoon is a Korea-born, Vancouver-based artist whose work explores the entangled relations of tourism, militarism, and colonialism. Since the early ’90s, she has used photography, video, and performance to situate her personal experience of migration in relation to unfolding historical, political, and ecological conditions. Through experimental cinematography and the performative gestures of family, friends, and community members, Yoon reconnects repressed pasts with damaged presents, creating the conditions for different futures. Staging her work in charged landscapes, Yoon finds specific points of reference across multiple geopolitical contexts. In so doing, she brings worlds together, affirming the value of difference.
Over the last three decades, Jin-me Yoon’s work has been presented internationally in hundreds of exhibitions, and she has mentored many students over the years while teaching at Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts. In 2018, she was elected as a Fellow into the Royal Society of Canada in 2018; and in 2022, she won the prestigious Scotiabank Photography Award.
About The Book
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.
Purchase here
Banner image: Jin-me Yoon, Souvenirs of the Self (Lake Louise), 1991
