Upon seeing her you know how it was for her. You know how it might have been. You recline, you lapse, you fall, you see before you what you have seen before. Repeated, without your even knowing it. It is you standing there. It is you waiting outside in the summer day.
– Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee, 1982
Jeju Island is located fifty miles to the south of the Korean Peninsula. Its lava rock coast was formed more than a million years ago by an underwater volcanic eruption. The past is a foreign country, as the saying goes, yet the spectres of Japanese colonisation and subsequent American military occupation, state violence, and massacre cast their long shadows over Jeju Island, which finds itself once again at the crosscurrents of ongoing processes of militarisation, land dispossession, and environmental degradation.
In her debut UK solo exhibition ‘Halmang’, at esea contemporary, internationally acclaimed artist Jane Jin Kaisen unveils her visually striking, polyphonic moving-image works which stem from extensive interdisciplinary research. Presented in the historic Market Buildings — once part of the Victorian Smithfield Fish Market — the exhibition intricately connects its location with Kaisen's ancestral ties to Jeju Island, where her mother and grandmother made a living as haenyeo, the island’s women sea divers who harvest seafood from the ocean. By weaving together oceanic cosmology and landscape, the exhibition becomes a vessel for narrations, pushing against the erosion of remembrance in the course of modernisation.
Themes of memory, migration, borders, and translation have long been the cornerstones of Kaisen’s artistic practice. Through the rhythms that emanate from songs performed by minority communities and the sound of crashing waves, works in the exhibition evoke Jeju Island as both a cartographically situated place and as a movingly spiritual one, wherein politics and gendered social norms are reproduced far beyond the island's shores. The exhibition’s title ‘Halmang’ is borrowed from the eponymous central piece in the show. In Jeju, halmang refers to the island’s many shamanic goddesses as well as grandmothers, but it is also a respectful form of address for women; the exhibition is an inquiry into multiple perspectives on displacement and gendered histories. Born on Jeju Island, Kaisen was transnationally adopted to Denmark as an infant. Returning to Jeju in her adult life, Kaisen engaged with the island’s genocidal Cold War history, its natural environment and enduring spiritual culture from a multi-layered, transnational feminist lens.
This exhibition is conceived by Xiaowen Zhu and curated by Dot Zhihan Jia, with generous support from Arts Council England, GMCA, and the Danish Arts Foundation. The public programme is in partnership with the School of Digital Art (SODA), Manchester Metropolitan University. Artist Assistant: Pauline Koffi Vandet.
Jane Jin Kaisen (born 1980 in Jeju Island, lives in Copenhagen) is a visual artist, filmmaker, and Professor of the School of Media Arts, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts.
Spanning the mediums of video installation, narrative experimental film, photographic installation, performance, and text, Kaisen’s artistic practice is informed by extensive interdisciplinary research and engagement with diverse communities. She is known for her visually striking, multilayered, performative, poetic, and multi-voiced feminist works through which past and present are brought into relation. Engaging topics such as memory, migration, borders, and translation, she activates the field where lived experience and embodied knowledge intersect with larger political histories. Through multi-year projects and collaborations, she has engaged topics such as transnational adoption, the Korean War and division, the Jeju April Third Massacre, and Cold War legacies. Another recurring focus revolves around nature and island spaces, cosmologies, feminist re-framings of myths, and engagement with ritual and spiritual practices. Working from the thresholds of mediums and forms, disciplines and sensibilities, her works negotiate and mediate the means of representation, resistance, and recognition, thus contouring alternative genealogies and sites of collective emergence.
Kaisen is a recipient of the New Carlsberg Foundation Artist Grant (2023) and a 3-year work grant from the Danish Arts Foundation (2022). She represented Korea at the 58th Venice Biennale with the film installation Community of Parting (2019) in the exhibition History Has Failed Us, but No Matter curated by Hyunjin Kim. She was awarded “Exhibition of the Year 2020” by AICA - International Association of Art Critics, Denmark for the exhibition Community of Parting at Kunsthal Charlottenborg. Kaisen has participated in the biennials of Liverpool, Gwangju, Anren, Jeju, among others. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Jane Jin Kaisen: Braiding and Mending’ at The Image Centre (2023), ‘Of Specters or Returns’ at Le Bicolore (2023), ‘Currents’ at Fotografisk Center (2023), ‘Parallax Conjunctures’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2021), ‘Community of Parting’ at Art Sonje Center (2021) and Kunsthal Charlottenborg (2020). Other recent exhibitions and screenings include: ‘Dislocation Blues: Jane Jin Kaisen’, Tate Modern (2023), ‘Ceremony (Burial of an Undead World)’, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2022), ‘Checkpoint: Border Views from Korea’, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (2022), ‘Unmoored Adrift Ashore’, Or Gallery Vancouver (2022).
She holds a PhD in artistic research from the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Art and Cultural Studies, an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio Art from the University of California Los Angeles, an MA in Art Theory and Media Art from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and she participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program.
Other exhibition and screening venues include: Kunsthal Århus, Nikolaj Contemporary Art Center, The National Museum of Photography (DK), Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlinale, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Times Art Center, Museum Ludwig, Videonale (DE), Asian Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Gana Art New York, DePaul Art Museum (USA), ARKO Art Center, Seoul Museum of Art, Incheon Art Platform, Seoul New Media Art Festival, Leeum Samsung Museum of Art, Asia Culture Center, Coreana Museum of Art, DMZ International Documentary Film Festival (KR), Silencio Club, Palais de Tokyo, Foundation Fiminco (FR), Malmö Konstmuseum, Malmö Konsthall, Inter Arts Center, Kalmar Art Museum (SE), Sørlandet Art Museum and Oslo Kunstforening (NO), Finnish Museum of Photography (FN), ParaSite (HK), Kyoto Arts Center, Kyoto Museum of Art, Fukuoka Museum of Art, Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, (JP), Times Museum Guangzhou, Beijing 798 Art Zone (CN), Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Art, Taiwan International Documentary Film Festival (TW), Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (PH), The National Gallery (Indonesia), and Townhouse Gallery (EG).
The video installation Halmang (2023) revolves around a group of eight women in their 70s and 80s who have made a living together for most of their lives as haenyeo. A black lava rock islet was once a shamanic shrine for the wind goddess Yeongdeung Halmang. In Kaisen’s poignant visual imagery, the women’s hands meticulously fold and connect sochang — long white cotton pieces of cloth symbolising the spiral movement of spirituality and the cycle of life and death. As the video unfolds, the sochang winds around the islet like a parting embrace.
The Gallery also includes a vitrine table displaying archival documents and personal memorabilia which have been collected by Kaisen and relate to the haenyeo sea divers’ anti-colonial resistance and their connection to the shamanic spiritual culture in Jeju Island. They serve as metaphors of how political histories and collective memories are inextricably informed by individual stories.
Kaisen’s artistic sensibilities are as much about the embodiment of loss and exile as they are about resilience, the continuity of stories, and the formation of alternative communities. Presented in the Communal Project Space alongside books and reference material are Of the Sea (2013) and The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger (2010). These works further contextualise the scope of Kaisen’s practice and provide insights into her long-term investment in the political history of Jeju, gendered histories, and engagement with transnational diasporic and minority communities.
In Of the Sea (2013), Kaisen retraces her mother's and grandmother’s steps along the craggy basalt shore, holding a book about the haenyeo sea divers’ anti-colonial resistance written by her grandfather, former Head of the Commemoration Committee for the Jeju Haenyeo Anti-Colonial Resistance Movement. The once-banned Song of the Haenyeo echoes in the background as Kaisen treads in the footsteps of time. This intergenerational portrayal illustrates the symbiotic relationship between the haenyeo and the sea, continuity and rupture, and Kaisen’s attempts to counter amnesia in official historiographies.
Composed of oral testimonies, poetry, public statements and interview fragments, The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger (2010) 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 the narratives that have been constructed to silence histories of pain and violence inflicted upon the bodies and lives of women and children.
Inspired by the women’s acts of folding and caring for the sochang, Jane Jin Kaisen’s ‘Halmang’ subsequently expands into a series of dialogues, gatherings, and readings, as well as off-site presentations and screenings across the city at partner venues, collectively shaping a plural landscape that renders visible different pathways of connectivity.
Dot Zhihan Jia, Curator
