Jinny Yu

Jinny Yu’s solo Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) exhibition, “at once,” focuses on new work, with 22 new pieces comprising works on paper and oil on aluminum from her ongoing series “Inextricably Ours.” Curated by Georgiana Uhlyarik, the AGO’s Fredrik S Eaton curator of Canadian Art, this exhibition notably marks Yu’s abandonment of her all-black paintings, made between 2009 and 2020, for brightly coloured works. The new paintings continue the artist’s research into and exploration of the relationship between guest and host in the context of a settler/ colonizer dichotomy, specifically Yu’s being an immigrant to Canada and therefore a settler on Indigenous land (Yu immigrated to Canada from Korea in 1988). In this framework she explores the split between being invited as a guest by the government and not being invited by settlers.

A trajectory Yu’s work took that is prescient of the current work is embodied in her piece titled Don’t They Ever Stop Migrating?, produced for the 56th Venice Biennale, 2015, as a response to the refugee crisis in Europe at the time. Using Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Birds, 1963, metaphorically, she produced abstract black ink marks on fabric, recalling her black paintings and resembling migratory birds in an immersive installation accompanied by the sounds of abstracted, often incoherent English voices. Her metaphorical consideration of human migration was followed by an investigation of immigration.

Yu’s interest in exploring her identity as an immigrant and settler began in 2017 in a series titled “Perpetual Guest.” She produced glass pieces installed on the floor so that viewers look down—a gesture symbolizing, hence encouraging, contemplation of the land on which one resides. In 2020 Yu furthered her inquiry into the relationship between guest and host, producing a book of drawings titled Hôte, centring on black and white images of a door opening in various increments to represent the roles and responsibilities of the guest and the host and their subsequent varying degrees of connection.

The specific question of what constitutes being a guest on Indigenous land is one Yu feels that all non- Indigenous Canadians should approach. In this exhibition she raises that question by producing guest–host-related works that may be interpreted as abstract land acknowledgements, alluding to the position of immigrants and settlers on land that does not belong to them.

“Inextricably Ours” considers the interplay between guest and host by employing geometric, hard-edged abstraction as a springboard. Inspiring her was Edwin Abbott’s 1884 novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, which used shapes to satirize the British class system by portraying classes as dots, lines and three-dimensional forms. Yu was fascinated with the idea of shapes representing social groups and used to initiate open-ended narratives and create irregular geometric shapes that could not exist in reality.

She avoided 90° angles in her exhibited geometric abstractions, rendering three dimensions as two, resulting in rectangular shapes lacking 90° angles. Metaphorically these forms indicate that how you see the world may be skewed or illusory. The paintings’ geometry and questions of normativity raise the notion of seeing value in imperfection, and channel Greenbergian theory but in reverse, treating the picture plane as an illusion rather than flattening it in hopes of overcoming this illusion and representing the truth, or the essence, of form. Simultaneously, the geometric forms imply a guest-host relationship.

In Inextricably Ours 22-01, 2022, oil on aluminum (152.4 × 139.7 centimetres), a box of several orange hues and tones floats above a green ground. The shape is geometrically impossible, almost like a failed Escher drawing, not only creating an illusion but also divulging its fakery. It remains separate from the ground, an isolation stressed by the contrast of the orange off-rectangle shape against the solid green ground. Perhaps its isolation hints at the immigrant experience of being on the land but neither fitting in nor seeing it as theirs. That possibility is viable yet unclear.

Inextricably Ours G23-02, 2023, gouache on paper (54.5 × 50 centimetres), integrates figure and ground—at least to a degree. The off-kilter colour planes, notably the bright light red forming the bottom and, from another angle, the rectangle’s side, recall, among other paintings, Jack Bush’s hard-edged abstract works. Conflicting angles and subsequent perspectives show the box as both open and closed, perhaps implying a connection to the land that is wavering or incomplete.

Consequently, the question remains whether meanings arising from the impossible geometry of Yu’s shapes, their angles, and their symbolizing of the guest-host situation that is Canada resolve themselves to achieve coherence and unity. Much is left for viewers to complete. Still, that openness allows them to consider their place in relation to the land on which they make their home. Either way, Yu enters fascinating territory, using formal abstraction as a foundation for philosophical thought communicated by layers of allusions and symbols.

“Jinny Yu: at once” was exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, from June 22, 2024, to January 5, 2025.

Earl Miller is an independent art writer residing in Toronto.