Interview with Jinjoo Yang, Winner of the 2023 Impressions Residency

You are the latest recipient of this decade-long residency at the MMFA. Over the years, each artist whom I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know has had their own way of making use of this opportunity. I’m curious to know how you approached this unique and, hopefully, fruitful experience.

Being relatively new to Montreal, the residency helped me to make connections with the local art community. I spent the first half of my eight-week stint at the Museum researching its storage facilities and the artworks in it. I was given access to archival documents on the works, which offered a window into their specific circulation history and the issues surrounding their acquisition. Even though most of these documents were written several decades ago, the excitement and frustration contained in their lines still reverberate strongly today. These charged emotions changed the way I looked at the artworks.

In the latter half of my residency, I was busy preparing and producing the video recordings. Filming in a restricted area like a museum’s storage requires a lot of coordination, and I’m really grateful for the support I received from the MMFA throughout.

The resulting work you’ve created, Coming Home, is a four-channel video presenting objects in the Museum’s collection that are housed in storage. The images in it are synchronized with sounds. But Coming Home appears to be more than an ode to stored artworks and their histories. Is the title in some way connected with your own personal journey?

That’s true, it does reflect my personal story. Although that was not my original intention. I recently watched a documentary about Jonas Mekas, a Lithuanian-American filmmaker, who immigrated to New York City in his twenties.¹ In it, he says, “Film is home for me.” At first, this sounded strange to me, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I felt the weight of his statement. To me, home is not so much a physical place as it is what grounds me. I have lived in several countries since I left Korea in 2006. I’ve always had this sense of being on the margins and, to a degree, I prefer that perspective. It has led me to practise both art and architecture, two disciplines that make me think in almost opposite directions. Contrary to architecture, my artistic practice allows me to project inwards, to learn and to challenge the limits of my reasoning. This exercise of looking inwards is the meaning behind “coming home,” in that the project is about what I perceive and how I reconstruct it in my mind, rather than externally.

Music and auditory explorations are an integral component of your installations, as the way they interact with the images alters our perception of what we’re “looking at.” How do sounds and images come into play in Coming Home?

In Coming Home, the four videos are played simultaneously, side by side. Each one shows the Museum’s storage as if you were walking through it, but in four different directions. This forces the viewer to pick a video to follow while keeping the others in the periphery. You might start to notice a relationship between the images and sounds, because the instrumental sounds that are played while a certain artwork appears on one screen are also played while the same artwork appears in the other videos, lending a feeling of continuity to the viewing of the shifting images.

Let’s go back to the setting of your video. Can you tell us why you were interested in the collection in storage?

Among the artworks in the Museum’s storage – many of which are excluded from display – I was interested in those with extrinsic issues, such as a dubious attribution or lack of proof of previous ownership, possibly stemming from looting. This incompleteness created a paradigm shift for me about the artworks in question. I experienced a dichotomy of feelings towards these objects, sparked, on the one hand by their intrinsic qualities and, on the other hand, by the social and political contexts surrounding them, which shed light on the people involved and their realities.

Only a small percentage of a museum’s collection is on public view at any given time. In turning your gaze to the MMFA’s storage, you’ve helped make visible objects that would otherwise have been kept “invisible.” How does this paradigm of (in)visibility play out in your project?

Collection storage facilities form a core component of a museum’s spaces, but they’re often located in out-of-the-way, dark corners of the building complex. Museums are somewhat akin to ancient religious architecture that was built over top of sacred burial grounds and made into gathering places. Giving the public a look at the collection in storage allows them to imagine another dimension of the Museum beyond its physical walls.

When an “original” (physical) artwork is represented in a video, it becomes something else, its own entity. In this project, I was focused on sharing with viewers the way I engaged with the artworks, including those that had been kept in the dark for several decades.

When I watch your video, your exploration of “alternative dimensions” really stands out to me, and it seems that music is integral to creating this dimensional “otherness.” Can you tell me more?

When it comes to the audio component, I’m interested in sounds that enable me to visualize the movement of a person’s body. In this project, I worked closely with the composer Moon Young Ha and percussionist Josh Perry to create sounds while challenging themselves physically. For instance, with an instrument using a bow, Josh moves his hand as slowly as possible to prolong the duration of the sounds.

There’s a certain timeless sensation in music that I’m intrigued by. Imagine you’re watching a video recording of someone carrying a painting. You have this awareness that the events in the video happened in the past. Conversely, when I listen to music, I don’t necessarily think about the specific moment when the performance was recorded. It feels as if I’m listening to what is happening now. This “present-moment” aspect of music, its sensorial atemporality, helps us ground ourselves, anchor our attention as we watch the four-channel video moving in different directions.

The first time I watched your video, I was surprised by how you managed to turn the physical space and its boundaries into an ambiguous alternative space.

In architecture, space tends to remain in the physical domain. In mediums like video, space becomes more ambiguous. I can capture certain perspectives of the space and use them to compose alternate spatial experiences that are fundamentally different from what we’re used to.

This sense of visual displacement is enhanced by the way you exploit our perception of time and speed. The videos play simultaneously but were recorded at different speeds, right?

Yes, in fact, the same scene was recorded at four different speeds, and each speed was given a dedicated channel. This creates a certain underlying tempo or rhythm that changes when I compose different perceptions.

Most of your predecessors created their works after their residency, inspired by their experience. Instead, you decided from the get-go to develop your production in situ. I imagine that having to film in storage might have limited your choices, but in any case, I’m looking forward to being able to see the final result of your work soon!

Yes, the project is in the final editing stages. I believe it will be completed by the end of September.

About the artist

Newly based in Montreal, Jinjoo Yang was born in Korea, where she earned a BFA in Painting at Seoul National University. She later moved to New York City to study architecture at the Cooper Union. Previously, her audiovisual installation No Talk was presented at the Samilro Changgo Theater in Seoul, and her sound-generating kinetic installation Belfry was exhibited at the Oil Tank Culture Park in Seoul.