Jinny Yu: At Once

Texts by Marie-Eve Beaupré, Patrick Flores, Ming Tiampo, Georgiana Uhlyarik

“[I] reject[ed] the idea that painting is autonomous, contained only within its four corners. I realized that painting has to interact with, and is always affected by, the space it is in.”

 — Jinny Yu

JINNY YU: AT ONCE surveys artist Jinny Yu’s last decade of production, from her exhibition at the Venice Biennale Don’t They Ever Stop Migrating? to Inextricably Ours, her recent kaleidoscopically abstract paintings. Using methods as diverse as abstract painting and large-scale installation, Yu’s art ponders the implications of mass migration and rapid social change in contemporary society. In Perpetual Guest, Yu interrogates her status as a settler-immigrant; in Hôte, she navigates the relationship between guest and host through a series of black-and-white abstract drawings that resemble thresholds; in Inextricably Ours, Yu breaks from her previous work, using vivid colours, transparency, and distorted forms to continue to question what it means to be a guest and a host.

Jinny Yu’s work explores the role of painting as a means of trying to understand the world around us. Born in Seoul, Yu now lives and works in Ottawa on the traditional unceded territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation, and in Berlin. Yu’s work has been shown widely in exhibitions in Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, Portugal, South Korea, the UK, and the US. Her exhibition, Don’t They Ever Stop Migrating?, was presented at the 56th Venice Biennale.

• Hardcover
• 120 pages
• Published September 17th, 2024