Jinny Yu embraces the language of abstraction as a means to investigate and understand the world around us. In her most recent body of work, Inextricably Ours, she explores the relationship between guest and host in the context of her experience as a settler immigrant in Canada living on Indigenous land. Yu divides her surfaces into planes of kaleidoscopic colour, implying forms and folds of three-dimensional shapes while remaining just outside the realm of possibility. Her nuanced compositions can be read as a metaphor for the complexities of positionalities in the places we inhabit.
Based in Ottawa, Yu spends part of her time in Berlin where she focuses on works on paper, a fundamental part of her practice. Favouring watercolour and gouache, Yu pays particular attention to edges which never quite come into focus and often overlaps boundaries of colour. Her intricate brushwork is echoed in her larger oil on aluminum paintings. Yu has worked on aluminum since 2004, her chosen support material for its ability to reflect light and retain an element of intangibility. Yu carefully controls the level of transparency throughout the work by allowing each layer to dry before applying the next.
Yu immigrated to Montreal from Seoul, Korea in 1988 and is currently a Professor of Visual Arts at the University of Ottawa. Her acclaimed recent exhibition, at once, at the Art Gallery of Ontario will open at Fondation Guido Molinari in June 2025. Yu’s series of drawings, Hôte, will be on view at Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ exhibition, Two by Two, Together: Recent Additions to the MMFA’s Collection until July of this year. In 2015, her installation, Don’t They Ever Stop Migrating? was presented during the 56th Venice Biennale. Yu has also participated in several artist residencies including at La Napoule Art Foundation in France, BoxoPROJECTS in Joshua Tree, the KIAC in Dawson City, ISCP in New York, Seoul Museum of Art Nanji Studios, and at the Banff Centre for the Arts.