Vancouver artist Jin-me Yoon’s work displayed on exterior façade of the National Gallery of Canada
The large-scale collage, Honouring a Long View, is part of the venue’s Leading with Women series
Jin-me Yoon, Honouring A Long View, 2024, installation view from the south façade of the National Gallery of Canada. Photo by NGC
VANCOUVER-BASED KOREAN-Canadian artist Jin-me Yoon’s work can now be seen on the south exterior façade of the National Gallery of Canada. The large-scale collage, Honouring a Long View, is the third edition of the museum’s Leading with Women series, which highlights the power of art to build bridges. The lens-based artist’s monumental offering will be on display until the spring of 2026.
Yoon revisited her 2017 work Long View specifically for the new installation. Long View was created as part of the LandMarks 2017/Repères 201 in celebration of Canada’s sesquicentennial anniversary. It addresses the ongoing impacts of colonialism and militarism that are obscured by the scenic beauty and touristic lure of the Pacific Rim National Park Reserve on Vancouver Island, in the traditional territories of the Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations.
Honouring a Long View suggests various ways to connect with place and history. The installation, which is 80 metres long and nine metres high, traces Yoon’s lived experience of the Korean Canadian diaspora. Honouring a Long View is anchored by a photograph of the artist gazing out toward the ocean with binoculars. She looks in the direction of Korea from Long Beach in Pacific Rim National Park Reserve.
By looking through her binoculars, Yoon is also drawing attention to the geopolitical, historical, and personal meanings of local political landmarks in the vicinity of the National Gallery of Canada, such as the Peacekeeping Monument, Parliament Hill, and the American Embassy, according to a release. She acknowledges the deeper histories retained in the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe Nation, and the sculpture Maman by Louise Bourgeois.
A large mound represents an ephemeral monument, countering official records that either hide violence or dismiss the traumatic personal histories experienced by the first wave of Koreans to Canada following the nation’s centennial in 1967.
“I’m a pretty prolific researcher and reader,” Yoon told Stir in an interview at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2022. “I’m not just interested in facts or chronological history. Telling a more expanded version of history requires a break with the concept of linearity. So I’m really interested in how history is told.”
Yoon emigrated with her family to Vancouver from Korea in 1968. She earned a bachelor’s of fine arts degree from Emily Carr College of Art (now Emily Carr University of Art + Design) in 1990, and two years later completed a master’s of fine arts degree at Concordia University in Montreal. Yoon returned to Vancouver to teach in the visual arts department of Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts, where she is currently an associate professor.
The National Gallery of Canada’s permanent collection holds seven photographic works by Yoon: Long Time So Long (video), 2023; Untitled 9 (Long Time So Long), 2022; ChronoChrome 2 (Long Time So Long), 2022; Fugitive (Unbidden) #2, 2004; Fugitive (Unbidden) #3, 2004; Unbidden: Jungle-Swamp, 2003; and Souvenirs of the Self (Lake Louise), 1991, printed 1996.
Yoon’s work has appeared in solo and group exhibitions in North America, Asia, Australia, and Europe. 
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