The Korean Cultural Centre is pleased to present  the <Virtual Artist Studio Visit> series.   

Due to the prevailing pandemic situation for the past year, artists were removed from their familiar places to present their works when many exhibition spaces were forced to close with no clear idea on when to reopen while exhibition visitors also lost opportunities to meet their favourite artists and be enlightened by their unique perspectives which can be a guiding light in this unprecedented time of isolation. 

Considering that social distancing is still an important parameter to overcome the COVID 19 pandemic, the KCC has prepared a series of virtual artist studio visits that can connect artists with their audiences safely from home. As the first season of the program, we invite prominent Korean Canadian artists to show us how they spend their stay-at-home time and what kind of new works they are envisioning and visualizing. 

This program is planned to introduce a new episode on the last Thursday of each month. 

Our second episode is a tour to the internationally recognized Canadian artist Jinny Yu’s studio in Ottawa. 

 

Jinny Yu’s work grows out of an inquiry into the medium of painting, as a means of trying to understand the world around us. A transnational artist, she lives and works on the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinàbe Nation and in Berlin. 

Text about the work on the video:

by Sarah Amarica

In recent months, encumbered by the realities of art-making during a global lockdown, Jinny Yu began a new daily drawing practice. For Yu, painting and drawing are actions, processes by which the artist repeatedly marks the surface of a paper—scratching, looping, hatching, both softly and cautiously—not to arrive at a final image, but rather as a continual process of uncovering. The velvety, smooth traces of Yu’s oil-based graphite pencil cover the paper from edge to edge, no space left untouched. Over forty drawings later, Yu’s Hôte (“Host” and/or “Guest”) series emerged, and with it, a view into the ongoing ideas driving the artist’s practice: an exploration into belonging and unbelonging.

From Yu’s former series Perpetual Guest to her current series Hôte, the artist has fixated on the roles and responsibilities of guest and host to negotiate ideas of self, land, and national identity. As a settler-immigrant, Yu explains that she is constantly reckoning with her own role as someone welcomed by a settler state, yet never able to fully belong when the state itself is rooted on contested Indigenous land. For Yu, this sense of unease or complicity as a settler-immigrant in Canada brings up larger questions surrounding ownership and right to land, or, more specifically, who welcomes and who dispels people from it; who is the guest and who is the host.

In Hôte, Yu uses the door as a symbol for this grey-zone between guesting and hosting, belonging and unbelonging. In some images, a sharp, delineated shape cuts through the centre of the image, like a stone monolith imposed onto a barren landscape. In others, the difference between foreground and background, object and space is less discernible, as greys, blacks, and whites blur together, with only Yu’s delicate marks to tell the difference. Architectural in nature, Yu’s images both beckon and confront the viewer, providing little certainty as to whether one can step through the cavities safely, or peer into the empty voids without being confronted or struck by whatever awaits beyond. In both composition and concept, Yu’s Hôte series does not make clear whether the visitors (and the artist herself) are imposing or being embraced, forcing us to ask the question: are we welcome here?

And herein lies the message or realization that Yu is grappling with: neither fully guest nor host herself, the desire to belong can be as messy and fraught as it is alluring. Rather, sharing a space, a country, a territory, or a home with others requires critical reflection and does not always elicit the pleasantries that hospitality usually connotes. Like Yu’s drawings, this distinction is blurry, but necessary.

Please click the image below to launch the video.