Event
Jane Jin Kaisen, 'Strange Meetings', 2017, video still. Courtesy of the artist.

Finissage Screening: Jane Jin Kaisen

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2024
15:00 - 17:00
Book Tickets

On the occasion of the finissage of Jane Jin Kaisen's solo exhibition 'Halmang,' esea contemporary presents three of Kaisen's earlier filmworks in the Gallery.

These films collectively delve into the complex, transgenerational issue of gender and militarism, at the nexus of colonisation, nationalism, patriarchy, and imperialism. Through Kaisen's works, we witness the intertwined narratives of gendered violence and unresolved pasts.

Kaisen’s 2010 film, ‘The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger’, currently on view at our Communal Project Space, follows the stories of three generations of women: the former ‘comfort’ women who were subjected to military sexual slavery by the Japanese military between World War I and World War II; women who have worked as sex workers around US military bases in South Korea since the 1950s to the present; and transnationally adopted women from South Korea to the West since the Korean War.

The two other films featured in this screening, ‘Entanglements’ (2017) and ‘Strange Meetings’ (2017), delve deeper into the history of one of the former STD (sexually transmittable disease) treatment centres situated near Soyo Mountain in Dongducheonsi, South Korea. These centres were where local sex workers were forcibly isolated in the 1970s. Through Kaisen’s filmmaking, we witness how spatial and temporal reconfiguration can blur boundaries and structures.

The event will be accompanied by a text written by Soyi Kim, titled 'Jane Jin Kaisen’s Strange Meetings — The Epidermal Memory of the STD Control over Korean Camp Town Sex Workers', which was included in Kaisen’s 2020 publication 'Community of Parting' about the work 'Strange Meetings.' This text offers additional insights into the issue of US military camptowns in Korea and the STD facilities.

Pauline Koffi Vandet, Interim Director at Fotografisk Center in Copenhagen, will join us at the Finissage Screening to introduce the programme. She will also provide insights into Jane Jin Kaisen's artistic practice and discuss their longstanding collaboration.

 Jane Jin Kaisen, ‘Entanglements’, 2017, video still. Courtesy of the artist.
 Jane Jin Kaisen, ‘The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger’, 2010, video still. Courtesy of the artist.
 Jane Jin Kaisen, ‘The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger’, 2010, video still. Courtesy of the artist.
 Jane Jin Kaisen, ‘The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger’, 2010, video still. Courtesy of the artist.
 Jane Jin Kaisen, ‘The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger’, 2010, video still. Courtesy of the artist.
Pauline Koffi Vandet, photo courtesy of Ida Højgaard Thjømøe.
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Caption

Programme List:

‘The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger’, 2010, 72 min

‘Entanglements’, 2017, 09:08 min 

‘Strange Meetings’, 2017, 11:08 min

Total running time: 1 hour 32 min

‘The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger’, 2010, 72 min

‘The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger’ explores ways in which trauma is passed on from previous generations to the present through a sense of being haunted. Following a group of transnational adoptees and other women of the Korean diaspora in their 20s and 30s, the film unveils how the return of the repressed confronts and destabilises narratives that have been constructed to silence histories of pain and violence inflicted onto the bodies and lives of women and children.

Composed of oral testimonies, poetry, public statements and interview fragments, the filmic narrative unfolds in a non-chronologic and layered manner. By reinterpreting and juxtaposing historical archive footage with recorded documentary material and staged performative actions, multiple spaces and times are conjoined to contour how a nexus of militarism, patriarchy, racism and nationalism served to suppress and marginalise certain parts of the population and how this part of world history continues to reverberate in the present moment.

‘Entanglements’, 2017, 09:08 min 

The video shows the hands of a woman who was forcibly detained at a STD treatment facility for six months in the 1970s. While she meticulously draws a map of the building from her memory, she describes in detail the architecture of the facility and how the daily life of her and other women detained at the STD treatment facility was strictly managed and regulated.

‘Strange Meetings’, 2017, 11:08 min

In the 1970s, the spread of sexually transmitted diseases among US soldiers stationed in South Korea became a bilateral crisis. ‘Strange Meetings’ explores how this history resonates in the present by documenting a former STD treatment facility in Soyosan near the North Korean border where sex workers servicing US soldiers were detained against their will. A host of strange meetings, the building today materially bears witness to the entangled relations behind its establishment and the impossibility of containing disease and enforcing strict borders by isolating certain bodies deemed dirty from those deemed clean.

The video shows respectively the interior and exterior of the decaying building, which today is a host of strange meetings. The floor of the building is dense with rubbish and the building structure is being encroached upon by the surrounding vegetation. Knotted together, distinctions between inside and outside, architecture and debris, are dissolved. The exterior of the building is the site of another strange meeting: each weekend a fire-blowing drag performer utilises the backside of the building as a backdrop for a performance attended by an ageing local audience, thus complicating the relationship between past and present, overriding but potentially also purging the violent history of the site.

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Biographies
Jane Jin Kaisen
Soyi Kim
Pauline Koffi Vandet
About this series
Jane Jin Kaisen: Halmang
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