Finissage Screening: Jane Jin Kaisen

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.

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.

Image credits (in order of appearance):

1. Jane Jin Kaisen, 'Strange Meetings', 2017, video still. Courtesy of the artist.
2. Jane Jin Kaisen, ‘Entanglements’, 2017, video still. Courtesy of the artist.
3. Jane Jin Kaisen, ‘The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger’, 2010, video still. Courtesy of the artist.
4. Jane Jin Kaisen, ‘The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger’, 2010, video still. Courtesy of the artist.

About Jane Jin Kaisen

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).

About Soyi Kim

Soyi Kim is an LB Korean Studies Postdoctoral Fellow of the East Asian Program at Cornell University. Trained in cultural studies and art history, her research specialisations include contemporary feminist art, media studies, and body politics of modern and contemporary South Korea and the Korean diaspora.

About esea contemporary

esea contemporary is the UK’s only non-profit art centre specialising in presenting and platforming artists and art practices that identify with and are informed by East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) cultural backgrounds.

esea contemporary is situated in an award-winning building in the heart of Manchester, home to one of the largest East Asian populations in the UK. Since its inauguration as a community-oriented visual arts festival in 1986, esea contemporary has continuously evolved to establish itself as a dynamic and engaging space for cross-cultural exchanges in the British art scene, as well as in a global context.

esea contemporary aims to increase the visibility of contemporary art practices from the East and Southeast Asian communities and their diasporas. It is a site for forward-thinking art programmes that beyond exhibitions also include commissions, research, residencies, publishing, and a wide range of vibrant public events. esea contemporary values creativity, compassion, interconnectedness, and collectivity in implementing its mission.

Learn more at: www.eseacontemporary.org

Photo by Joe Smith.

Host or Publisher esea contemporary