Work from A Group for 2067 (Pacific Flyways) series

From the series A Group for 2067 (Pacific Flyways), this image of a young woman by Jin-me Yoon cites an earlier, monumental photographic installation by the artist titled A Group of Sixty-Seven (1996). In this earlier work, sixty-seven members of the Korean Canadian community are photographed in front of iconic paintings by Lawren Harris and Emily Carr. The Harris and Carr paintings are emblematic of a typical Canadian historical painting style, in which the landscape was presented as vast and uninhabited, undermining the long history of Indigenous presence on these lands. The title of Yoon’s work refers to the year 1967, both the Centennial of Canadian Confederation as well as the year in which immigration restrictions were eased to allow for greater migration to this country.

In A Group for 2067 (Pacific Flyways), Yoon has replaced the painted backgrounds of her earlier series, instead photographing Korean Canadian youth at the Maplewood Flats Conservation Area on Tsleil-Waututh lands. The young people photographed are draped in saekdong, a brightly hued, patterned fabric used for traditional Korean ceremonial clothing, long associated with both protection and resilience. The sitters in these images face into the foliage as a gesture towards a future that is to be written with the possibilities the next generation presents. Many of the youth featured in this series are of mixed ancestry and by photographing them against a Canadian landscape on traditional Indigenous lands, Yoon presents this grand-scale image as a call for a more inclusive future, sensitive to the complexities of co-existing on this land, free from conventional binaries.

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