The art of spurring up-and-coming photographers and raising their profile
QUÉBEC CITY, Nov. 19, 2019 /CNW Telbec/ - The Estate of Lynne Cohen, in collaboration with the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (MNBAQ) and its Foundation, is proud to announce that the Prix Lynne-Cohen has been awarded to Jinyoung Kim. The biennial award seeks to support the practice of emerging Québec professional artists in the visual arts with emphasis on photography. The 2019 recipient will receive a $10,000. To highlight the artist's work, the MNBAQ has produced a video portrait that it will disseminate on all its platforms.
"I'm delighted to learn that Jinyoung Kim will be the second recipient of the Prix Lynne-Cohen. I am certain that Lynne would be delighted. Jinyoung Kim's striking approach would have delighted her since even if her photographs differ from her work, the same spirit invests them. I am indeed impressed with her Objects on the Rooftop and Jugong Apartment. Like the photographs of Lynne Cohen, they offer narratives suffused with mystery. Moreover, Jinyoung Kim's compositions appear to be self-contained. Her photography and video creations unquestionably deserve sustained attention. They are imbued with calm and modesty and reveal themselves through patient observation. What more can we ask?" enthusiastically noted Andrew Lugg of the Estate of Lynne Cohen.
Members of the 2019 Prix Lynne-Cohen jury
A jury assembled by Eve-Lyne Beaudry, Curator of Contemporary Art at the MNBAQ submitted and examined proposed candidates. The jury comprised Georges Azzaria, Director of the École d'art de l'Université Laval; Ève Cadieux, visual artist, exhibition curator and lecturer in art history and the visual arts; France Choinière, Director of Dazibao, a centre dedicated to the dissemination of contemporary image-based practices; and Diane Charbonneau, former curator of modern and contemporary decorative arts and photography at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and a regular member of juries in the realms of design, arts and crafts and photography. Each jury member submitted the name of an emerging artist whose career spans a maximum of 10 years. Jinyoung Kim was unanimously chosen from a list of four artists.
The MNBAQ and the Estate of Lynne Cohen also wish to congratulate the artists nominated for this second edition of the award: Anne‑Renée Hotte, Yoanis Menge and Anne-Marie Proulx.
The jury members were impressed with Jinyoung Kim's talent, which simultaneously reveals considerable rigour and deep sensitivity. The artist engages in essentially photographic practice insofar as she expresses a keen desire to document and create a certain archeology of observation. While most of her images are void of individuals, her work essentially focuses on human nature.
Jinyoung Kim's singular approach
Jinyoung Kim was born in South Korea and raised in Canada. Her work reflects the necessity of rooting itself in two places. It focuses on the relationship between a sense of belonging and identity, which she explores through her own life story and that of others. Her current research is concentrated more specifically on the notion of "place" and the way the absence of individuals and the presence of a place affect self-perception. Her photographs and videos blend documentary and fiction to produce metaphorical narratives that examine questions of identity, a sense of belonging and the relationship between place and self.
It is with the series Objects on the Rooftop (2014) that Jinyoung Kim launched a significant body of work that examines the "house" as a conceptual entity and a place of memory. The artist seeks to better understand our attachment to our origins and explores the notion of "a home of one's own." While objects relate the past, their materiality is rooted in the present and offers a highly personal metaphor of identity building.
The series Jugong Apartment followed, which the artist launched in the summer of 2016 in South Korea, after she learned that her childhood neighbourhood was to be razed to make way for more modern buildings. The images captured by the artist reveal abandoned areas and others that are slowly emptying. Void of any human presence, the sites suddenly seem hostile and far removed from the dream that many people shared in the 1970s of acquiring an apartment in Jugong, on the outskirts of Seoul. Over five or six years, more than 30 000 people were evacuated, and 120 buildings were demolished to make way for the dream of the luxury condo.
Since 2016, Jinyoung Kim has pursued the research initiated with Jugong Apartment by devoting herself to Apparitions of Collective Disposition. Back in the Seoul suburbs, the artist focuses on a certain protocol governing the disappearance of sites: the inhabitants leave, garbage lies around, wandering animals move in, then trees, and playgrounds, benches and even streets disappear one by one until the buildings are demolished. Jinyoung Kim documents this process and the deterioration of memory that it engenders.
Jinyoung Kim, in a nutshell
Jinyoung Jinyoung Kim holds a bachelor's degree in fine arts from OCAD University in Toronto and a master's degree from Concordia University in Montréal, where she now teaches photography. She has exhibited her work at Momenta – Biennale de l'image 2017, Volta Bâle 2018, Papier 18 & 19, VENDU—SOLD, and in galleries in Canada: Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery (Montréal), VU Photo (Québec), Galerie 101 (Ottawa), Maison de la culture Frontenac (Montréal), Espace Cercle Carré (Montréal), and abroad at the Focus Photography Festival in Mumbai, India. Jinyoung Kim was a finalist for the Prix Pierre-Ayot 2019 and a finalist for the Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Fellowship in Contemporary Art in 2014. She also received the Roloff Beny Foundation Fellowship in Photography. ESSE and Vie des arts magazines and La Presse and Le Devoir have devoted many articles to her. Her works are found in the collections of the Ville de Montréal, Hydro-Québec and in numerous private collections.
A video portrait of Jinyoung Kim
The MNBAQ has produced a video brief in Jinyoung Kim's Montréal workshop to publicize the artist and her work. The report, disseminated on the MNBAQ's social networks in conjunction with the announcement that she is the second winner of the Prix Lynne-Cohen, highlights her artistic approach and presents a selection of works that illustrate her career in recent years. To view: https://youtu.be/0UBM0FgbVqY
Lynne Cohen, impressive and inspiring in equal measure
Lynne Cohen is certainly one of the most respected contemporary photographers in Canada, whose renown extends to the United States and Europe. She was born in 1944 in Racine, Wisconsin. Following a year of study at the prestigious Slade School of Fine Art at University College London, in 1967 she obtained a bachelor's degree in science from the University of Wisconsin, and in 1969, a master's degree in visual arts from Eastern Michigan University. She settled in Canada in 1973, where she lived until her death in 2014. She first lived and worked in Ottawa for 30 years, where she taught at the University of Ottawa and assiduously pursued her artistic practice. In 2003 she moved to Montréal.
Throughout her rich, diverse career, Lynne Cohen devoted herself to the photography of interior spaces, which she captured as they appeared to her, without intervention or staging. The singularity of her work lies in the choice of spaces usually devoid of human presence and usually out of sight. Classrooms, science laboratories, thermal establishments and military facilities are all complex, inaccessible environments that she thus makes visible to measure their strangeness.
Lynne Cohen participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions the world over. Moreover, major retrospectives offered in-depth analyses of her artistic career, including the exhibition that the National Gallery of Canada organized in 2001, which toured Canada and France; and the recent exhibition organized by the Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid in 2014, presented at the Sala Vimcorsa in Córdoba and at the Sala Rekalde in Bilbao. Her work is found in nearly 50 public collections, including those of the National Gallery of Canada, the Australian Art Gallery, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. Lynne Cohen received a number of distinctions during her prolific career, including the Governor General's Award, the highest distinction granted for excellence in the visual arts and the media arts, and the first Scotiabank Photography Award, which highlighted the artist's outstanding contribution both to the advancement of her discipline and to raising its profile.
About…
The MNBAQ
Located in the heart of the National Battlefields Park, one of the world's most prestigious urban parks, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec is a unique museum complex bringing together art, architecture and nature. The museum's vast collection, comprised of over 38,000 works created since the 17th century, is showcased throughout four distinct pavilions. Paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, and prints are shown in various exhibitions in the historic art pavilion, while works from major artists Jean Paul Lemieux, Alfred Pellan, Fernand Leduc and Jean-Paul Riopelle adorn the modern art pavilion. The Pierre Lassonde pavilion, inaugurated in June 2016, highlights the collection of contemporary Quebec art from 1960 onward including Inuit art, decorative art and design. The central pavilion, with its glass pyramid, links the four pavilions together and offers a discovery area for children. mnbaq.org
The MNBAQ's Foundation
The MNBAQ's Foundation headed a major fundraising campaign dedicated in large part to the construction of the Pierre Lassonde pavilion. Its mission is to contribute to the museum's development by enriching its collections, diversifying the exhibitions offered and increasing accessibility to its program of educational and cultural activities. fmnbaq.org
SOURCE Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec
For further information: Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, 418-643-2150 or 1 866-220-2150
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