Robin Laurence. "Yoon Makes Amazing Images of Motherhood, Milk, and Kimchi," The Georgia Straight. May 2001.

[transcription]

Yoon Makes Amazing Images of Motherhood, Milk, and Kimchi

VISUAL ARTS
Jin-me Yoon

Intersection
At the Catriona Jeffries Gallery until May 26
By ROBIN LAURENCE

A house finch is singing in the birch tree outside my window, his rosy breast pulsing in the spring sunshine. My cat sits on the windowsill inside, his tail twitching in vexation. Sun, song, and cat hairs drift over the open book in my lap, Sharyn Rohlfsen Udall's Carr, O'Keefe Kahlo/Places of Their Own. I'm struck by the ways in which each of these early modern artists deflected domesticity. I'm also struck by their common childlessness.

Having just returned from viewing Jin-me Yoon's exhibition Intersection, I can't help wondering what the impact of motherhood would have been on the creative lives of Emily, Georgia, and Frida. Certainly, motherhood has profoundly altered Yoon's art practice, not simply in her current choice of subject matter—maternity—but in the way she shapes her images. Yoon's sensibilities have clearly shifted, as has the creative power she now extends to evocation, imagination, and humour.

The formidable intellect and theoretical models familiar from Yoon's earlier bodies of work continue to inform her explorations of the theme of identity. But an intuitive engagement with the unknown has also been seamlessly knit into her art-making. There's a new ease here, a new latitude of access for the viewer, too. You don't need to be versed in Lacanian psychoanalysis, for instance, to get Yoon's images.

Upstairs at the Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Yoon is exhibiting three new works in the "Intersection" series she began in 1996, after her first child was born: two large photo diptychs of staged scenes and a three-part video projection. The title of the series seems to refer to the intersection of different and sometimes conflicting identities inscribed on the body.

Humour is much in evidence, especially in Intersection 5, two large C-prints whose scale and rich colours call up both advertising and the Vancouver school of photography. In the left-hand panel, a maternal figure lies supine arid staring, dead or comatose, on a brigh-tpink ground. Milk flows like blood from the neck of her elegant black dress and through her pearl necklace, and the legs of two small children extend below her hem, as if they were feeding under her —or inside her skin. Although the image is at first suggestive of a six-legged octopus, it is also strongly evocative of an insect being eaten alive by its ravenous young, of parasites devouring their hapless host. Milk appears in puddles, streams, and clouds in the right-hand panel, too. Here, the mother has disappeared and her young are left to play delightedly in what remains of her—milk and pearls.

In the diptych Intersection 3, the colliding constructions of gender, ethnicity, vocation, arid maternity are most explicit. With a background of midnight blue, the left-hand panel both mimics and critiques the Madonna and Child of European painting tradition. Yoon's contemporary Madonna (she uses herself as her primary model) is an image of exhausted disengagement from the fair-haired baby she holds in her arms. She looks bleakly away from the child, while clutching a computer mouse whose cord is suggestively umbilical. Is she a working parent, sleep-deprived to the point of catatonia? Or is she an automaton, a cyborg whose dual roles are too demanding for a mere mortal? The metal foot of an office chair glints dully at her slippered foot, beneath which is the murky trace of a puddle of milk.

The social and cultural traditions of mother and child are further disrupted by confusions of gender and race. The sexless, plaid dressing gown, short hair, arid lack of makeup of the mother figure contribute to an unsettling sense of androgyny rather than a socially sanctioned image of femininity. And the contrast between the mother's Asian features and the baby's apparent European ancestry causes us to question our assumptions about the "natural" bond between mother and child.

In the right-hand panel, Yoon brings forward the woman's professional persona: a university lecturer with a slide changer in her hand. Again, androgyny is imaged in the woman's hair, clothing, and aggressive stance. (Like motherhood, professionalism seems to demand the desexualizing of women.) The darkness here is that of a slide lecture rather than a midnight feeding, and the puddle of milk on the floor is consigned to a spot beneath the lecturer's notebook. More obviously, milk is being violently expelled from the lecturer's mouth, spat out as if it were foul, rank, poisonous. Milk drips, splatters, gushes, and pools throughout the "Intersection" series, suggesting another opposition: toxicity versus nurture.

Projected at the back of the gallery, Yoon's silent video work again calls up toxicity in the context of the maternal body, although here the body is evoked by surrogates, by found and documentary images of nonhuman subjects. Intersection 4 juxtaposes a head shot of Yoon, attempting to keep her eyes on the viewer as she drifts off to sleep (her eyelids slide shut and snap open, her head nods and bobs), with a dreamy sequence of jellyfish undulating past the camera and, on the adjoining wall, a close-up view of a pair of plastic-gloved hands making the Korean dish known as kimchi.

Yoon's bobbing head seems to speak not only to a condition of exhausted maternity but also to a state of altered awareness, while the jellyfish, transparent, membranous, insubstantial, suggest otherness or alienation. Their transparency, however, is poisonous; their gorgeous undulations, dangerous.

It's in the images of kimchi production, however, in which thick chili paste is applied to layer after layer of cabbage leaves, that viscerality, childbirth, and the interior of the maternal body are most powerfully evoked. The folds and layers of the cabbage are metaphoric of female flesh and tissue, the bulbous end of the cabbage of the crowning head of a baby, and the chili paste of blood and gore. The rhythmic application of the chili paste to the delicate cabbage leaves is almost sexual, while the gloved hands suggest something surgical, invasive, almost violent. Instead of being inscribed on the body, maternity and otherness are simultaneously conjured from within it. It's an amazing conjunction of images.