The current issue of the Visual Arts Journal, the magazine of the School of Visual Arts, includes "Spotlight: Seoul," a feature highlighting some of the many SVA alumni who live and work in South Korea's capital city. Over the next few weeks, we will post the individual profiles as standalone articles on sva.edu. First up: acclaimed fine-art photographer JeongMee Yoon (MFA 2006 Photography, Video and Related Media).

Photographer JeongMee Yoon's fascination with typologies and what they reveal about societies has been a thread woven throughout her work over the past two decades. Her MFA thesis, "The Pink and Blue Project," shot in New York and Seoul and widely exhibited around the world, depicts small girls and boys dwarfed by their huge collections of color-coded gender-specific toys, clothing and other objects. The meticulously staged, brightly hued images are powerful statements about gender-based marketing and rampant consumerism. They also exemplify Yoon's ability to leverage an image's framework to tell a story, as seen from her early black-and-white "Zoo" series (1999) to the more recent "Animal Companions," a 2015 project showing the connection between animal ownership and a person's identity and social status. In that series' catalog, art critic Hyeyoung Shin observes, "Unlike a portrait photography, which focuses only [on] a person, [Yoon] provides environmental information surrounding the subject to contribute not only the visual content but also its form."

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