For more than a decade Jin-me Yoon's work has explored the mechanisms
and functions of identity construction. Continuing this research
during a 1998 residency at Confederation Centre Art Gallery &
Museum in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Yoon produced Touring
Home From Away, a project that further explores the cultural functions
of landscape, and representations of place as they pertain to
the body and subjectivity.
In PEI, visitors are identified as "from away," even
though tourism is now the mainstay of the province's economy.
Tourists are drawn to PEI by images of its selectively reinvented
landscape, history, and social conditions. As is the case at most
tourist destinations, this imaginary situation invites visitors
but then precludes their belonging or fitting in. Re-working PEI’s
imaginary presentation of itself, Yoon explores the ways in which
the myths of the Island are manifested.
The exhibition Jin-me Yoon: Touring Home From Away presents three
works generated from this image series: two wall-mounted works,
and an installation comprised of eighteen images mounted in nine
suspended double-sided lightboxes. In the latter work the first
image pair involves two figures sited within a typically bucolic
PEI landscape. Unidentifiable in the frontal image, these figures
face the landscape, drawing our attention to its pastoral beauty.
In the verso image their identities become apparent. We recognize
an "Asian" woman and a "Native" man. John
Joe Sark is a PEI resident, a Native activist, and the Keptin
of the local Mi'kmaq Grand Council. Reading across this image
pair we learn that the location is a golf course.
People familiar with recent Native land claims in Canada will
be reminded of situations in which golf courses located on sacred
ground have been the focus of Native insurrection. Further conjunctions
and disjunctions unfold within the work's subsequent image pairs.
And several entwined narrative strands emerge involving arrays
of related cultural constructs -- heroism, homeland, nationhood,
family, gender and sexuality. Yoon's images point to the role
of such narratives, and to their implications for intimate and
publicly invigilated social relationships. Along with John Joe
Sark, the artist and members of her family, the project also features
Shauna McCabe who is currently Curator of Contemporary Art at
Confederation Centre Art Gallery & Museum. McCabe appears
as a stand-in for the fictional character Anne of Green Gables,
an internationally promoted national icon that is among PEI's
most ubiquitously exploited promotional devices.
