Upon entering the Glenbow Museum Lecture theatre, I was impressed by the attendance of anxious listeners awaiting Jin-Me Yoon's speech on her artwork. I immediately concluded that she must be a well-connected or popular artist, with a lot of personal expression and meaning behind her work.
             I was very captivated by the beginning of her lecture, essentially the thesis behind her work. She articulated the focus of her work dealing with cultural functions of landscape and representations of place as they pertain to the body and subjectivity. She has a focus of how we become human, and stories of nationalism and culture are apparent in her work. However, when I witnessed the piece "Welcome Stranger Welcome Home," my initial response was a sense of questioning, and confusion. I do not feel that I would have grasped the meaning of her piece if she were not present to explain her intent in complete detail.
             This particular piece, "Welcome Stranger Welcome Home " did not speak to me or move me on any emotional level because its visual properties were very constant. A quality that assumes to have a fixed value in a specified context viewed by the author alone. If she was not there, I wonder if I would have simply felt I was looking at a nice postcard.
             Jin-Me Yoon in "Welcome Stranger Welcome Home" is in a fixed pose waving periodically, with footage of a parade to each side. In my opinion, this was a piece where the viewer cannot participate in asserting his or her own interpretations of the artwork. Rather there is one specific and fixed value to the meaning assigned to the piece, and the artist must let us know her purpose and intent for the piece to be appreciated.
             Descriptively Jin-Me Yoon's entitled work; "Welcome Stranger Welcome Home," is a 10 by 24-inch piece, which stills from DVD projections transferred from video. Essentially the piece is broken into three segments. Two flanking images, inverted in footage to one a...