JeongMee Yoon visited families with young children and arranged scenes using the possessions of the child, then asked the child to pose for a photograph with their things. For the girls the overall effect is of a blanket of pink, with the young owner settled among her treasures with an absence-minded expression. The Blue series does the same for boys, but there, the collections of super-hero figures, toy weapons and other masculine artifacts give an overall blue color to the room.
In each case the individuality of the child has been trumped by the vivid color and over abundance of objects that overwhelm the space. Once they must have craved those toys, but that original desire seems gone, replaced by a look in their faces that seems more tired and empty than happy and satisfied.
Where does the idea of pink for girls and blue for boys come from? It seems to be widespread across many cultures around the world. Yoon takes this symbolic use of color for gender identification as her theme. The photographs show a microcosm of our consumer culture in which the development of gender, character, social and sex roles has split very early into a girl's world of pink, and a boy's of blue. Their dreams are made from the stuff of YV commercials which advertise the things we buy, and give to our children, without thinking about the implications of those choices.
The luxury materials of our society often seem grotesque. Something feels a little scary to see it all displayed so nakedly before us. What have we wrought? Seeing these photographs I imagine the toys and children assimilated together as one beast, propagating and multiplying themselves.
Yoon's success comes from the combination of the installation artist's creativity in arranging a beautiful…

D'Art International , Spring 2007, P26