Jinny Yu

At 12:38 PM on August 29, 2020, the PHI Foundation Exhibitions Manager received a text.

Hi John, there was just an incident in the Gallery, a visitor in G5A stepped on Jinny Yu’s work and it shattered.

The work in question is or was, one of the paintings that made up, Perpetual Guest (2019), 

presented in the exhibition RELATIONS: Diaspora and Painting. This group show was dedicated to an exploration of the complexity of diasporic consciousness manifested in equally multifarious approaches to painting. The government’s closing, re-opening, and re-closing of museums and galleries due to the COVID-19 pandemic meant that the exhibition was open sporadically, and for very few days during its aggravated five-month run. The ‘incident’ occurred on one of those few days.

Perpetual Guest is a long-term and evolving project that is a visual expression of Jinny Yu’s uneasiness with her position which she describes as a” first-generation settler immigrant”1 – having been invited and permitted to immigrate to Canada yet living on colonized and unceded indigenous territory. This discomfort underscores the aporia of guest and host relations as explored in Derrida’s 1996 essay Pas d’hospitalité, a text that continues to haunt Yu’s work. Within the Canadian context of settler colonization, how do racialized immigrants situate themselves? Who is the guest and who is the host and what are their responsibilities? How can one be a ‘good guest’ and a ‘good host’? Can an immigrant person be a host? These are just some of ways that Perpetual Guest complicates the Setter position and the diasporic experience. 

The project consists of paintings – oil on sheets of glass, which sit on short lengths of aluminum pipe. The glass is untempered, and the pipes are not fixed in any way underneath the paintings, making the works intentionally fragile, vulnerable, and even dangerous. The paintings are presented horizontally with the thin glass panes only inches from the floor to bring our attention through, to the unceded land upon which the works and we reside. Featuring rectangular bands of varying widths and saturations of the colour black, the paintings offer up monochromatic fields ranging from transparency to opacity.  A very crucial component of the project is a site-specific land acknowledgement, presented in large vinyl lettering also placed on the floor, with careful consideration of the interaction between space, the paintings, and visitors. Up to the time of Perpetual Guest, Yu had consistently referred to her paintings as self-portraits in an extended sense, in order to bring her existential questions – ‘who am I?’ -  into contact with questions about painting – ‘what is it?’. With this in mind, a shift in consciousness can be detected with the 2015 work Don’t they Ever Stop Migrating?. Presented during the 56th Venice biennial, this installation immersed the visitor into a three-dimensional painting of swirling masses of black ink brushstrokes on white fabric, accompanied by a collage of sound clips from the Alfred Hitchcock film ‘The Birds’ which desperately ask “Where did you come from? What are you? What’s happening?”. Departing from questions about the Self and painting, this work gave Yu the opportunity to explore her position and condition within a larger socio-political realm, seizing upon the context of Venice to respond to the refugee crisis in Europe. This turn is deeply significant in how it underpins Yu’s growing politicization as an immigrant, diasporic, woman of colour. In 2016, a series of massive changes in her life led Yu to immerse herself in critical theory – a period that she refers to as her radicalization - that would deeply inform her future works including Perpetual Guest.

At the PHI Foundation, the land acknowledgement was applied to the floor diagonally across the space, with a painting on one side and two paintings on the other. To add an additional layer to the consideration of the diasporic position, three paintings on aluminum from her project why does its lock fit my key? (2018) were placed on two walls, deliberately off kilter. The title is taken from the 2012 Toni Morrison novel ‘Home’, which explores the difficult negotiation of identity, place and belonging.  This oscillation between the assertion of one’s place in a new ‘home’ as a diasporic person combined with the irreconcilability of guest/host relations as an immigrant person on colonized, unceded territory point to massive questions that continuously define Yu’s life and work. When first presented in Gatineau, Quebec at the Galerie UQO in 2019, Perpetual Guest entailed nine paintings with the land acknowledgment placed at the entrance, bringing the visitor’s gaze immediately to the floor reinforcing the need to tread with care. The understanding of how a visitor came to step on her work at the PHI Foundation, despite clear indications will forever be one of speculation.

Very soon after the shattering of glass was heard, a flurry of texts resulted in the swift closure of the gallery space in which Yu’s work was placed. The PHI Foundation staff mobilized to examine the work, the artist was contacted, and photos were sent. When I saw the remains of the work, I too felt crushed and ashamed that I had not done everything I could to protect the work from harm. I felt I had failed in my responsibilities as a host and custodian. We all felt that way. The following day, a heartbroken Yu replied in an email to outline her thoughts. She felt she needed to see the destroyed work in the space in order to decide what to do for the rest of the show. On Thursday, September 3, 2020, she met with the Head of the Foundation’s Technical Department. They quickly agreed that keeping the shards of the former work on the floor might be a safety concern. Instead, the pieces were removed and kept at the Foundation until Yu could think of what to do with them.  She then adjusted the layout of the two remaining paintings with respect to the placement of the land acknowledgment and determined that the installation could still be effective in its re-configuration.

A few days later, on September 8th, the Head of our Technical Department shared a message he received from Jinny.

I am still pondering …the solution I came up with last week as I find that now, the text becomes more of a boundary rather than including the viewers on the land as perpetual guest which was my original intention…

Yu did not return to make any further adjustments to the work, but her reflection offered us more ways of thinking through the multiple aspects of the guest/host conundrum in applied ways. As settlers and employees of the PHI Foundation, we considered our complicated role more profoundly than ever, as hosts responsible for safeguarding the work, and as perpetual guests on stolen land. 

On October 1st, the government ordered the re-closure of museums and galleries which prompted Yu to return to the PHI Foundation to retrieve her box of broken pieces. As the pandemic went on, it sat in her studio, in a way, incubating. After a few months, she summoned the courage to open the box, and little by little over the course of the rest of the pandemic, she worked on this most complex and painstaking of puzzles. Months later, on May 27th, Jinny emailed me with news.

Over the last few months, I slowly put the broken pieces back together and, in the process, I thought about the concept of reparation. What is being repaired? Is reparation possible? Repairing presupposes that a good/original state existed, which was altered somehow. Reparation - or simply putting pieces back together - is possible in the case of Perpetual Guest as it had an original state. But can I compare my process of repairing Perpetual Guest in the studio to the process of reconciliation between Settlers and Indigenous Peoples, when there was no “good” state to begin with? Is reparation/reconciliation even possible in this case? These are some thoughts that came through as I was putting pieces back together on my studio floor, of which I attach a few photos.

… In any case, I wanted to also relate to you that what happened to Perpetual Guest at the Fondation PHI has presented me a new direction of thought, and I want to thank you and the Fondation. 

Please let me know your thoughts. I am also available for an online meeting (as I’m currently in Seoul) if you would like. 

My very best,
Jinny

Jinny’s message and images gave me and the staff great solace and healing. Her words also reminded me of the writing of artist, curator and writer David Garneau. In his 2012 essay, Imaginary Spaces of Conciliation and Reconciliation, he describes the problematics inherent to the use of the word reconciliation, in initiatives such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission2. He effectively argues that this choice of word is a misnomer given it implies “the repair of a previously existing harmonious relationship”.3 With this clarification, Garneau explains in depth how the notion of reconciliation is in fact a construct.

This word choice imposes the fiction that equanimity is the status quo between Aboriginal people and Canada. It narrates halcyon moments of co-operation before things went wrong as the seamless source of harmonious origin. And it sees the residential school era, for example, as an unfortunate deviation rather than just one aspect of the perpetual colonial struggle to contain and control Aboriginal people, territories, and resources. 

The word conciliation on the other hand means “the action of bringing into harmony”, acknowledging the dissonance between two or more parties. Garneau asks how we might change sites of reconciliation to sites of conciliation and how artists might contribute to that conciliation. Perpetual Guest, with its dangerous materials and tenuous form of display, viscerally transmits the disquieting unsettledness of the immigrant-settler as well as the settler position and goes a long way to expressing what is at stake if we do not acknowledge the truth about reconciliation. Yu understood that her painting had been destroyed, meaning reconciliation in the true sense would not be possible. But perhaps something new could emerge.

As both a physical and symbolic act, repair has been a vital area of exploration for a number of artists, notably Yoko Ono, Lee Mingwei, Nadia Myre and Kader Attia. Ono’s 1966 Mend Piece is one of her earliest and well-known instruction works that consists of a white room in which a large pile of broken dishes is strewn across a white table. Visitors are instructed to join the broken pieces together using string, tape and glue. The new assemblages are then displayed on a white shelf. As part of the instructions, Ono indicates: 

Mend with wisdom
mend with love
mend your heart.
It will mend the earth
at the same time

Lee Mingwei, who shares great affinity with Ono’s work has been presenting his work Mending Piece since 2009. Visitors are invited to bring cloth items in need of repair. While mending the item, Lee shares a moment of conversation with the visitor, as a way of underscoring the work of emotional healing from trauma and loss. The way that Lee mends the garment does not hide the damage. Instead, an ornamented and colourful stitching pattern closes the tear or hole, with colourful embellishment. Nadia Myre’s Scar Project (2005-2013) invited participants to sew their physical, emotional, or spiritual scars onto 10-inch squares of raw canvas and also asked them to provide a written account of the injury.  By 2013, she had accumulated over 1400 canvasses with their accompanying texts that display and speak to the individual and collective experience of suffering but also of healing and resilience. Kader Attia has made repair central to his practice. The 2016 work J’accuse for example, consists of the projection of the eponymous anti-war film by Abel Gance onto wooden busts inspired by the injury and disfigurement of millions of World War I soldiers. Instead of the idea of repair as restoration which return things to their original state, what interests Attia, like Ono, Lee and Myre, is how wounds and injuries are a testament to the history that created them. Formally, what connects these works is the need to call attention to and preserve the trace of the damage. Attia, Lee and Ono refer to the Japanese tradition of kitsugi, which is the art of mending together pieces of broken pottery using lacquer mixed with gold or silver. This technique reminds us of the history of the damage through an elevation and commemoration of the injuries, making of these pieces something that did not exist before, and obliging us to remember what transpired. Rather than hide or disguise, these artists, including Jinny Yu, acknowledge the impossibility repair as well as the error of restoration. 

On November 23, 2023, I received this brief email:

Dear Cheryl,

I just wanted to share with you some photos of my work that came out of the show at the Fondation PHI three years ago. The accident propelled me to think through guesthood/hosthood/repair. It was shown in Ottawa last month.
I titled this work “Perpetual Guest 2019/2022 Impossibility of Repair” (2023)
I attach the brochure of the show.

Warmest,
Jinny

Perpetual Guest 2019/2022 Impossibility of Repair debuted on October 27th, 2023, at the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in Ottawa as part of a two person show with Marina Roy titled, The Painted Object. Although Jinny had mentioned the possibility of a new work issuing from the broken one, I had no idea that something had been completed. My heart fluttered when I saw the images. I was stunned by the profound beauty - one that only suffering can reveal - and felt proud, like an Auntie. About one third of the original work had remained intact as a very large shard, and Jinny meticulously placed the rest of broken pieces together, some less than a millimeter long, leaving spaces of various widths between each one. Part of the work is a one-and-a-half-inch platform, upon which the assembled pieces sit, centered yet completely, and frighteningly, unadhered. The platform dimension is large at ten-by-twelve feet, allowing for three to four feet around the glass composition. The possibility that a visitor might mistake the platform for part of the floor is high, recalling the risks, responsibilities, and questions intrinsic to the work’s history. Perpetual Guest 2019/2022 Impossibility of Repair moves and swirls, reminiscent of the brushstroke swarms of Why don’t they ever top migrating?. The work had me zooming out, to observe a topological terrain. The negative spaces around the broken shapes reveal creeks, rivers, deltas, islands, and land masses. With knowledge of the work’s history, she had me zooming back in, to consider a discursive set of concepts, including territory, ownership, migration, agency, constraint, chance, and intention. I don’t think the back story is necessary to appreciate the work, as Yu’s general approach, never closes off meaning. However, through our human experience, we know what damage looks like. Revealing the destruction as Jinny does, means something happened that should not be forgotten.

In a conversation, Jinny explained that it was important to present the work at the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts because of its location at the confluence of the Ottawa, Gatineau, and Rideau rivers. Her work had ideal placement in a gallery space that looked out through expansive windows onto a magnificent view of the unceded ancestral territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation. The show opened with a talk between Yu, Roy, and art history professor Ming Tiampo, in which Yu discussed the problematics of the new work.  Afterwards, a friend of Jinny’s came up to her and said, “How about perpetual repair”? This thought pleased Yu, with the acceptance that these questions joyfully defy resolution. 

Destruction, which can be understood as dismembering, can allow for transformation through re-membering, if there is the courage to do so. The events of Yu’s life journey have informed her politicization and exploration of the complexities of the diasporic experience, the logical impasse of guest/host relations and the unresolvable notion of perpetual repair. These ongoing reflections have now prompted her to question and dispense of former self-imposed rules to allow for an exploration of new directions for her work. She is increasingly distancing herself from the idea of her paintings as self-portraits. She is embracing image and opening up her colour palette. After almost thirty years of art making, she is liberating herself. In doing so, she is giving herself the gift of perpetual transformation.

Notes:

1. See Entretiens #3: Conversation between Amy Fung, David Garneau and Jinny Yu on Perpetual Guest, 22

2. https://nctr.ca/about/history-of-the-trc/trc-website/

3. David Garneau, Imaginary Spaces of Conciliation and Reconciliation West Coast Line #74, vol. 46, no. 2, Reconcile This!, Summer, 2012, pp. 28-38 (*quote on pg.35)