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Hildebrand Fellow Claire Chun Explores How Artist Jin-me Yoon Illuminates Complexities of Asian-Canadian Identity
Claire Chun is a PhD candidate in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. Her dissertation research examines the ways that Asian North American diasporic art and media critically engage issues of settler colonial and militarized imperial violence. Claire received a 2023 Hildebrand Graduate Research Fellowship to conduct fieldwork in Canada, examining how artists complicate notions of “Asianness” and grapple with the complexities of living and working in a settler-colonial society.
With the generous support of the Canadian Studies Program, I conducted four weeks of fieldwork in Vancouver and Toronto during Summer 2023. As part of my ongoing research on Korean diasporic visual cultures, I wanted to explore how Asian Canadian visual culture negotiates and is animated by histories of settler, imperial, and environmental violence alongside ongoing Indigenous sovereignty struggles.
Through archival research, place-based observations, and site visits, my field research set out to examine, in Iyko Day’s words, “whether it is possible to view Asian Canada as a social category that is part of a distinctly Canadian racial formation, one that cannot be seen through the US prism of race”. In other words, my research asks: What can Asian Canadian aesthetic practices teach us about the particularities of Canadian racial formation? And how might a critical interrogation of Canadian race-making histories interrupt Asian “settler moves to innocence” as Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang put it?
To begin answering these questions, I first traveled to Toronto where I visited and viewed Korea-born and Vancouver-based artist Jin-me Yoon’s retrospective at The Image Centre, which commemorated her 2023 Scotiabank Photography Award win. It was an incredibly significant and timely exhibition that shifted the very terms of my later fieldwork in Vancouver. At Yoon’s retrospective, I was able to view her monumental photographic portrait series, A Group of Sixty-Seven (1996) and other seminal works alongside new art. My trip to The Image Centre allowed me to take stock of my own viewing reactions as well as those of other visitors to the gallery space. While in Toronto viewing Yoon’s exhibition on the traditional territories of the Anishinaabeg, the Haudenosaunee, the Mississaugas, and the Wendat peoples, I traced the ways that Yoon’s artistic career has been in dialogue with the ongoing histories of Asian settler colonialism and Asian Canadian diasporic cultural production.
This participatory viewing experience informed and shaped the field research I did in Vancouver the following month. After viewing Jin-me Yoon’s retrospective, I revised the scope of my archive by narrowing my textual analysis to Yoon’s body of work. Through a trained focus on selected artworks, I heightened my attention to the place-based politics of her aesthetic practice. In Vancouver, I visited the Maplewood Flats Conservation Area, located within the unceded territory of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation, which is also at the center of Yoon’s recent works, including Dreaming Birds Know No Borders (2021) and Becoming Crane (Pacific Flyways) (2022). I spent time walking along the trails, and observing how the conservation area relates to the looming Burnaby Refinery, located right across Burrard Inlet. I also spent time at the specific site of Yoon’s Becoming Crane series, because I felt it was important to experience Yoon’s work as an animating force where nature and the environment are collaborative actors and participants.
This focus on the place-based specificity of Yoon’s work heightened my attention to the cultural and ecological significance of Western Canada in shaping settler colonial frontier-building fantasies and tourism projects in the late nineteenth century. I followed this line of inquiry to the archives. At the Wallace B. Chung and Madeline H. Chung Collection at the University of British Columbia, I closely examined pre-war tourism materials from the Canadian Pacific Railway Company. My research in the archives provided me with the historical context needed to comprehensively grapple with the stakes of Yoon’s work, specifically Souvenirs of the Self (1991), Long View (2017), and Testing Ground (2019), which directly address how the settler colonial logics of Canadian tourism obscure the ongoing transpacific violences that link the militarized geographies of Korea and Canada together.
My field research in Canada ultimately served as a major step not only in my methodological considerations of how to bring place-based fieldwork, archival research, and close readings of visual art together, but also in my critical exploration of how Asian Canadian artists grapple with histories of diasporic displacement and migration in relation to ongoing settler, imperial, and environmental contestations. |
Royal Canadian Legion, US Branch #25 