SEOUL.- Art Sonje Center is presenting Community of Parting, a solo exhibition by Jane Jin Kaisen from July 29 to September 26, 2021. Jane Jin Kaisen’s work concerns themes of history, memory, translation, and migration. The exhibition features three recent works by Kaisen: the three-channel film installation Community of Parting (2019), an installation of six light boxes The Pull of the Moon (2020), and the dual-channel video installation Braiding and Mending (2020). All of them are rooted in the artist’s ancestral island of Jeju and her long-term research of Jeju shamanism. By juxtaposing the voices of repressed and marginalized communities with images and archival materials related to the historical incidents involved, Kaisen explores an aesthetic approach that incorporates multifaceted perspectives on events and multiple voices.




The 72-minute film installation Community of Parting takes its title from a passage in the book Woman, I Do Poetry by the poet Hyesoon Kim. The three screens in this work are positioned in a layered structure within the exhibition space. The first shows the artist dressed in a white traditional Korean garment and spinning inside an oreum (small parasitic volcanic cone) in Jeju Island. The video is filmed with a camera mounted to a drone, which is released by the centrifugal force of the spinning. As the camera leaves her hands, she is seen from above as a single point spinning in the island’s winter landscape. The second screen shows an aerial view of Jeju’s seascape, with its black lava rocks and deep blue water, juxtaposed with a narration that represents the introduction to the piece. The final screen begins with Jeju shaman Koh Sunahn preparing for a sacrificial “gut” ritual, while the stories of various voices that propel the filmic narrative are introduced. The division of the projection screens and the composition between heaven and earth, the sea and human beings, and the transition from an encompassing view to intimate narratives.

For its narrative framework, the work invokes the shamanic myth of Princess Bari. Abandoned at birth for being female, Bari is eventually offered to inherit half of the kingdom after reviving the dead but chooses instead to become a shaman mediating at the threshold of the living and the dead. As in that story, Bari in Kaisen’s work symbolizes loss, but also resilience and recovery, and transgressive potential of “otherness.” The symbolism of “abandonment” is echoed in portrayals of the divided land of the Korean Peninsula (including Jeju) and the country’s modern history. Within Kaisen’s work, various spaces, times, and voices are intertwined without hierarchy, including those passed through by the artist herself and the women of diaspora whom she met over five years in locations such as the DMZ, Jeju, Seoul, North Korea, Japan, China, Kazakhstan, Germany, and the United States. Intercut with this are scenes of the shamanic ritual performed by Koh Sunah who is also a survivor of the Jeju April 3 incident, repeated like a refrain throughout the video. These polyphonic voices create a rhythm of rupture and integration as they combine with the metallic echoes of shamanist paraphernalia, the sounds of a metal detector searching for mines along the DMZ, and the laments of the shaman being possessed by a spirit of the dead. Kaisen traces the impact of historical events on individual lives, examining in particular how gender discrimination and social marginalization have shaped communities marked by experiences of war and migration. The artist composes her video with a ritualistic rhythm that brings together the living and the dead, summoning them into a community of loss but also resilience and recovery. Like the shamanic myth of Bari, it is a structure of endless variations in which different stories and sounds circle and intertwine.

The Pull of the Moon made in collaboration with Guston Sondin-Kung consists of images taken as the artists placed objects in a tidal pool by the black lava rocks of Jeju Island, exposed when the tide rolls out and obscured when it rolls back in. The items placed on the rocks at the threshold moment of the tide include vernacular and shamanic sacrificial objects also portrayed in Community of Parting: brass bowls, fruit and rice offered to the sea by the haenyeo diving women of Jeju after saying a prayer, and myungsil, white cotton thread. Positioned on the rock like a fine crack, the myungsil connects with the skein-like knot of hair in Braiding and Mending. A white skein symbolizing life and hope of longevity presents us with a community of comfort, of mutual connection and mending, in the image of women seated in a circle braiding one another’s hair. Through these works, the exhibition shares Jane Jin Kaisen’s aesthetic vision: discovering and subverting the intersections of individual and collective memory in marginalized places, people, and events as she explores the possibilities of alternative communities and pathways.