Jin-me Yoon

Jin-me Yoon is a South Korean-born internationally active Canadian contemporary artist contemporary visual artist, utilizing performance, photography and video. The intersections between identity and location have been a central theme in her work. Having emigrated from Seoul to Vancouver as a child in 1968, Yoon became attuned to issues around migration and belonging. Many of her photographs, videos and performances explore these topics; an early breakthrough work, Souvenirs of the Self (1991), showed her standing in iconically “Canadian” settings such as the Rocky Mountains, sometimes alongside tourists. The deadpan, humorous quality of this project yielded to more serious questions about who is and isn’t regarded as a “natural” citizen.

Yoon is also interested in issues of sexual difference, and she uses her work as an opportunity to challenge stereotypical constructs that continue to permeate our culture. She received her BA from the University of British Columbia in 1985, her BFA from Emily Carr College of Art in 1990, and her MFA from Concordia University in 1992. Since 1992, she has taught at Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts. In 2009, she was nominated for the Grange Prize; her art has been exhibited at the National Gallery of Canada and the Vancouver Art Gallery, as well as internationally.