Hello Calgary
Vancouver artist Jin-me Yoon questions the way landscape shapes identity
PREVIEW
JIN-ME YOON
ArtTalk
Wednesday, September 25
Glenbow Museum
"Smile, you're a tourist attraction!"
Growing up, I recall hearing this slogan on countless occasions, most often during the Calgary Stampede and in our proudest civic moment, the 1988 Winter Olympics. I always took the phrase to be a suggestion more than a command, but after seeing Vancouver artist Jin-me Yoon's Welcome Stranger, Welcome Home, an exhibition currently on display at the Glenbow Museum, I'm beginning to reconsider.
Welcome Stranger, Welcome Home is part of the Glenbow's Connections to Collections series. Yoon was invited to respond to an aspect of The Group of Seven in Western Canada exhibit, also showing at the Glenbow, and the resulting work explores two examples of the way identity is formed through economic and cultural machinations. Yoon will discuss this aspect of her work, focusing on the idea of nationalism within an environment of intensifying globalization, in a lecture for the ArtTalk series being held in conjunction with Artcity.
Welcome Stranger, Welcome Home is a series of triptych video projections. The two flanking images consist of video footage of the Calgary Stampede, progressing forward on one side and backwards on the other. The central images framed between these are representations of Yoon, waving at the viewer, in front of Group of Seven paintings of the Rockies.
The image of the artist waving, while humorous, has a subversive edge to it. At times, she slips out of character and, instead of smiling, assumes a serious look, her wave becoming mechanical.
"When I was performing this, I was thinking about official situations where you have to wave, even against your will, as a force of power," says Yoon.
"When you see a switch from a wave that is more natural ('Hi, I'm here') to one that is more forceful and aggressive or mechanical, then you realize that the convention of the wave is just that, like the smile in front of a camera."
Yoon notes that there are strong parallels between her work and those exhibited in the Group of Seven show. Those artists, among others, were commissioned by the Canadian Pacific Railway at the turn of the century to produce work that presented idealistic views of the West that would encourage migration. The landscapes, as a rule, were depicted as unpeopled, pristine environments.
Yoon has long been fascinated with landscapes, and says that even in her early works, like Souvenirs of the Self, she was trying to postulate a new kind of national subject in relation to tourism. In that photo-based piece, Yoon inserted herself into various postcard landscapes, the idea being that the work, which was available in souvenir shops, would travel through the postal system, crossing borders.
"I'm essentially inserting my body into the landscape," Yoon says. "The question that emerges is 'Who's the tourist and who's the toured?'"
Yoon notes that in the 10-year period since she made Souvenirs of the Self, the nature of globalization has changed dramatically, and required her to change her strategies in addressing it. For example, in Welcome Stranger, Welcome Home there is a sense of the incredibly rapid compression of time and space within certain environments.
As Yoon says, it's not that much of a stretch to see similar strategies in the Calgary Stampede, an event which celebrates the past but is set within a concrete urban reality. In its contemporary incarnation, various ethnic communities claim a spot in the history it represents. Yoon notes that her work is not an outright criticism of the Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth, but she thinks the Stampede indicates fascinating things about the present and the past.
"Undeniably, a big part of the Stampede is based on historical trauma that's been glossed over," Yoon says. "All nations are born out of violence – they have to exclude. There are stories that tell about the origins – they have to talk about traditions. When you look at the Stampede, you see it played it out there.
"While I wanted to address some particular issues, I also wanted to leave it open to play – the way people gain meaning from them.... It's not that you can't judge these things, but I'm more interested in speculation.
"It's our job as artists to keep this complexity alive, and not just slide into a complacent postmodernism." |
