A pic I took of one of Jin-Me Yoon's videos at the VAG a couple weeks back. As this was my first visit to the exhibition, I swooped through it, gathering impressions first, details (like titles) on another visit.
Much has been made of holes in Jeff Wall's pictures, but with Yoon, the hole and its extracted medium (soil, earth) are given equal weight. Equal because they more or less share the picture's centre.
We don't see the complete interior of Yoon's hole, only its extracted space. From this extraction (can we call it a mound, or does that sound too much like a pubis?) we infer the size of the hole's interior.
Suddenly everything is gendered. Or maybe it is formal. The mound is, after all, pyramidal -- a triangle if you consider it two-dimensionally. (A half century ago, the adult pubis was pictured, if not clothed, with a triangulation of pubic hair. Not long after that, North American women began burning their bras; a decade later, they began extracting their pubic hair.)
Another video in the exhibition features people (an extended family?) digging on a beach. Here we don't see the hole or the mound so much as the labour, the relations.
I will see this show again, though from first impressions everything seemed to snap into place.
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