Call for Curators Exhibition 3 

Focus on Artist 2: Diana Yoo

Diana Yoo

Inconveniences

5 framed chromatic photographic prints

2022

As a second-generation Korean Canadian immigrant, I began working in my parents’ convenience store at an early age. My art practice is autobiographical in nature, and, for this reason, I begin my explorations with the convenience store as a site for reflection. This reflecting is a means to understand the silencing of Korean history that has been left in the margins in my life as a Korean Canadian. I turn to the commercial site of a convenience store to examine how capitalism numbs us from the traumatic history of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples in Canada. My photographic project Inconveniences was made to critique our capitalist commercial market where labour becomes the means for our interactions with one another. I underscore the importance of cultivating an unsettling aesthetics through the capitalist market to critique ourselves in the capitalist landscape. In the capitalist market, the seller detaches from their own history and separates present from past. While the store, for me, is a public space where Korean Canadian immigrants interact with the public, it is this kind of manual labour that numbs us and makes us complacent in Canadian consumer culture. I investigate how an unsettling aesthetics which I call spectral capitalism—capitalist culture that is haunted by ghosts—can help important questions emerge about Canada’s traumatic history of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit and can implicate us through a form of aesthetic hauntology. How might such haunting histories implicate our consciousness not only as viewers, but as subjects of capitalism, full of invisible specters and ghosts.