Liz Park
Crawl and Trace : Invisible Histories and the Project of Remembering
In a previous curatorial project, I had the opportunity to work with Vancouver-based artist Jin-me Yoon in presenting her 2003 video series Unbidden. _The way the artist crawls and scurries through an unspecified landscape in _Unbidden: Underbrush captured my attention and made me question what moved her in this way, along an inhospitable ground marked by jagged rock and scraggly bushes. Dressed in black, she uses all four limbs to negotiate the rough terrain as she grimaces and pants, going around in circles in an endless video loop. In Unbidden: Jungle Swamp, Yoon similarly scuttles, leaps, and falls, and in Unbidden: Grassland, she crawls on her hands and knees. It is only in Unbidden: Channel, that we see her body finally at rest, floating serenely on the water with closed eyes, a still body evoking death.
Known for her photographs from the 1990s, such as A Group of Sixty-Seven (1996) and Souvenirs of the Self (1991), in which the artist inserted herself into various re-creations of iconic Canadian landscapes, Yoon has consistently explored how her own body disrupts the reading of these landscapes and creates new meanings. Her body—that of an Asian woman—questioned national identity and body politics, as well as gender and race relations, against a predominantly white, patriarchal tradition of Canadian nationalist landscape paintings made most famously by the Group of Seven artists.[1]
In these representations of a rugged Canadian wilderness, Yoon’s body became a monument set in opposition to the myth of male-centric individualism embodied by European pioneers who tamed the terra nova. Unlike the still images of her photographs, Unbidden releases Yoon’s body from a previously stoic monumentality and stillness, granting her a movement and fluidity as well as artistic control over the space and time her moving body creates. No longer fixed to a place, namely an archetypal depiction of Canada’s wilderness, the videos in Unbidden mark the beginning of the artist’s interest in a particular type of movement: crawling.
Since Unbidden, Yoon has crawled in video projects across various landscapes in the same nondescript black clothing she wore in the first series. Equipped with a rolling platform, she has crawled on the streets of Seoul, Korea, and Beppu, Japan—two countries with overlapping memories of occupation, war, and suffering—in The dreaming collective knows no history (US Embassy to Japanese Embassy, Seoul) (2006), As It Is Becoming (Seoul, Korea) (2008) and As It Is Becoming (Beppu, Japan) (2008). The common act of crawling in these three works compels us to ask what the motivation is behind it. Why would she choose to perform an action considered lowly or infantile? I begin by looking closely at the ground that the artist’s body skims—the asphalt and dirt roads that are mute witness to the violent conflicts that have ravaged both Korea and Japan.
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About this Article
Crawl and Trace : Invisible Histories and the Project of Remembering was first published in Fillip 11 in Spring 2010. For more articles from this issue, see the Table of Contents.
Liz Park is a Vancouver-based curator committed to creating discursive spaces and generating forums in which to engage audiences with discussions of contemporary political and social realities.
Notes
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