Jin-me Yoon
Nationality: Korean-born Canadian
Born: 1960, Seoul, Korea

Jin-me Yoon was born in Seoul, Korea in 1960 and moved to Vancouver with her family in 1968. She received a B.A. (liberal arts; psychology) from the University of British Columbia (1985); a B.F.A. from the Emily Carr College of Art and Design (1990), and an M.F.A. from Concordia University (1992). She is currently Assistant Professor at the School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University.

Since the early 1990s Yoon has used photography to explore such issues as cultural identity, history and memory, and how such things are constructed and maintained. Early works such as the postcard project Souvenirs of the Self, in which the artist photographed herself in typical (and ironic) tourist fashion in various sites in Banff, Alberta, questioned ideas of belonging and the constructed relationship between landscape and identity. In a more recent work, Intersection (1996), which was included in Presentation House's exhibition Urban Fictions and reproduced in the accompanying catalogue, Yoon expanded her visual vocabulary to explore the artist's experience of motherhood. In that diptych the artist photographed herself with her back to the camera against a blood red background: in one photograph the artist wears a suit and is "armed" with a breast pump, while in the second, she wears a dress and holds her baby in front of her so we can only see a small leg around the mother's waist. A stream of milk drips from the child's leg onto a large bag, which sits on the floor.

Source: Acquisitions Justification