The Polygon Gallery hosts book launch for Korean photographer Jin-me Yoon, June 8

Artist’s work explores place and identity in the context of migration, tourism, militarism, and colonialism

SPONSORED POST BY The Polygon Gallery

Souvenirs of the Self (Lake Louise), 1991. Photo by Jin-me Yoon

The Polygon Gallery celebrates Jin-me Yoon, recipient of the 2022 Scotiabank Photography Prize, with a book launch on June 8 from 7 pm to 9 pm for her new major self-titled monograph published by Steidl.

Guests are invited to join in 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 the event for a special price.

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.

Covering over 30 years of artistic practice, Yoon’s book honours the complex yet highly distilled photographs of her 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.

Jin-me Yoon’s self-titled new book.

Featured works include 2004’s Fugitive (Unbidden), which calls up stereotypes imposed on Asian Canadians and Asian Americans through popular culture in the context of intergenerational histories of war; and 2022’s Long Time So Long, 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.

Over the last three decades, 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.

More information on the event, plus links to RSVP and purchase Yoon’s book, can be found here.

Post sponsored by The Polygon Gallery.