The Korean Cultural Centre is pleased to present <Virtual Artist Studio Visit 3> – Jihee Min’s Studio in Toronto.
Jihee Min is a Korean-Canadian multidisciplinary artist based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Based on her personal experiences of Korean Diaspora in both Quebecois and English-Canadian environments, Min explores art as means to engage problems of identity and displaced culture within Canada’s multiculturalism. Using a wide range of media, such as sculpture, installation, performance, photography and drawing, Min focuses on recreating a sense of location within displaced culture, into personal narratives that can relate to any viewers. Her work focuses on stereotypical issues of culture, language, memory and geography, and tends to stand in between being poetic and playful, without being didactic.
Min holds MFA from Concordia University and BFA with Honours from OCAD University. She received various grants from Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and Toronto Arts Council, as well as, numerous awards and scholarships including the Concordia MFA Studio Arts Award from Concordia University; the Sir Edmund Walker Scholarship and the Carmen Lamanna Scholarship from OCAD University. She has exhibited nationally across Canada and internationally, in the USA, Italy, Finland and Korea. Her work is part of various private and public collections including the city of Toronto (ON), St-Bruno (QC), and Rauma (Finland).
Please click the image below to launch the video.
A Few Flaps to Belong
"A Few Flaps to Belong(2017) makes a parallel between a human’s obsessive longing for flight and one’s desire to cope with a foreign land. Mimicking wings, this body of works evokes a romantic notion of flying in relation to the artist’s yearning for home and desire to belong. With the use of cyanotype, which is an outdated camera-less photographic technique that produces cyan-blue print, the works bring nostalgia to talk about her ongoing struggle for grounding Korean Diaspora within Canadian identity" (from the artist's note).
Due to the prevailing pandemic situation over a year, artists were removed from their familiar places to present their works when many exhibition spaces were forced to close with no clear idea on when to reopen while visitors also lost opportunities to meet their favourite artists and be enlightened by their unique perspectives which can be a guiding light in this unprecedented time of isolation.
Considering that social distancing is still an important parameter to overcome the COVID 19 pandemic, the KCC has prepared a series of virtual artist studio visits that can connect artists with their audiences safely from home. As the first season of the program, we invite prominent Korean Canadian artists to show us how they spend their stay-at-home time and what kind of new works they are envisioning and visualizing.
This program is planned to introduce a new episode on the last Thursday of each month.
The previous episodes are also available through the links embedded in the images below.
• February - Jin-me Yoon’s studio in Vancouver
• March - Jinny Yu’s studio in Ottawa
