From Jin-me Yoon, ‘Long View,’ 2017.
At the Rethinking Canada 150 conference this past April, keynote speaker Jin-me Yoon focused on terms of belonging, articulating the many ways in which Asia and Canada are entangled. Examining her body of work, Yoon explained her shift from thinking about diasporic identity in terms of displacement in a settler colonial context (as she explored in her 1991 postcard project, Souvenirs of the Self) to that of emplacement, or the tracing of embodied states of being through engagements with history, memory, cultural identity, and place. Yoon’s new video and postcard project, Long View, which was produced for the Canada-wide exhibition LandMarks 2017/Repères 2017, explores the idea of emplacement by foregrounding issues of migration and belonging. Based in the Pacific Rim National Park Reserve in British Columbia, the project focuses on transpacific connections between Asia and Canada. It bears witness to the intersections between tourism and military and colonial histories, identifying how they have shaped, and continue to shape, engagements with the land.
Learn more about Yoon’s project (and watch the Long View video) at the official LandMarks 2017/Repères 2017 website.