Toward a Formal Language of Resonance: Diaspora and Place in the Video Works of Jin-me Yoon

Abstract:Critically reflecting upon immigrant relations with place in North American and East Asian contexts, Jin-me Yoon’s lens-based art investigates the landscape as a site of diasporic emplacement. In her video works the artist uses a number of editing techniques as well as abstract camera work to interrelate sites in Canada and Korea, making visible the unseen impacts of colonialism, militarism, war, and tourism on the production of Asian diasporic subjectivities. This article examines the formal language the artist produces across three videos: Other Hauntings (2016), Long View (2017), and Living Time (2019), arguing that they function through resonance. I conceptualize how resonance operates visually, examining its potential to counter the representative, extractive logic of lens-based media and positing its use in Asian diasporic art.