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| Korean-Danish visual artist Jane Jin Kaisen poses at her exhibition "Community of Parting" at Art Sonje Center in Jongno District, central Seoul. Korea Times photo by Shim Hyun-chul |
By Park Han-sol
For Jane Jin Kaisen, a Jeju Island-born visual artist, who was adopted to Denmark in 1980, the island is much more than just her "ancestral land," or a place of biographical significance.
"I think Jeju sits in a very special place in modern Korean history in relation to the early Cold War and division of Korea. The Jeju April 3 Uprising and following Massacre were kind of the precursors to the ideological conflicts that led to the 1950-53 Korean War," the Danish artist told The Korea Times.
For many years, the legacy of a brutal military crackdown that occurred from 1947 to 1954 dominated the island. In the Jeju April 3 Uprising, civilian demonstrators opposed to the country's division were attacked and purged in an anti-communist campaign. The tragic incident took the lives of some 30,000 people ― nearly 10 percent of the island's population at the time. The truth of the brutality, however, remained suppressed for over five decades afterwards. Even still, the traumatic memories haunt many of the survivors.
These kinds of subjective memories and lived experiences of the marginalized have long been written out of the official, state-level historical narratives that Kaisen explores in her multi-channel video installations, experimental films, photography works and performances.
"I've always had a deep interest in notions of history and memory ― the intersection between personal memory and collective memory and the discrepancies that can exist between 'discrete' history and 'official' history," she said.
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| Visual artist Jane Jin Kaisen poses at her exhibition "Community of Parting" at Art Sonje Center. Korea Times photo by Shim Hyun-chul |
Moreover, the 41-year-old artist's own subjectivity as a Korean adoptee and her first visit to her home country in 2001 provided her a chance to think critically about diaspora as well as the "meaning of return." She became fascinated with other diasporic subjects who had also come to Korea and started viewing the phenomenon of migration as a complex result of larger political, structural mechanisms.
Based on the themes of history, memory, migration and translation, her wide range of filmic subjects over the years ― with most of them portrayed primarily in voice narration ― include: second-generation survivors of the Jeju April 3 Massacre, ethnic Koreans whose ancestors were forcefully relocated from the Russian Far East to Central Asia (known as "Koryo-saram"), ethnic Korean residents of Japan ("Zainichi Koreans"), North Korean refugees, women implicated in prostitution in U.S. military "camptowns" and transnational adoptees.
All of these groups represent communities that have remained at the margins of the official understandings of Korea's modern history, marked by colonialism, war and rapid national development.
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| Installation view of the exhibition "Community of Parting" / Courtesy of Art Sonje Center |
A number of Kaisen's latest video and photography works that investigate these themes through the peculiar lens of Jeju shamanism are currently on display at the exhibition, "Community of Parting," at Art Sonje Center in Jongno District, central Seoul.
The highlight of the exhibition is the video installation, "Community of Parting" (2019), which is displayed on three different projection screens in a layered structure, with one playing the 72-minute-long experimental film.
Its title derives from the passage in poet Kim Hye-soon's piece, "Woman, I Do Poetry" (2017), where the artist discovered the motif of this work: the ancient shamanic tale of Princess Bari.
Bari, born as the seventh and last daughter of a king who wanted a son, gets abandoned at birth. Years later, her parents become terminally ill, with the only cure, the elixir of life, to be found in the underworld. Bari, after trials and tribulations, succeeds in acquiring the potion. The king in return offers her a half of his entire kingdom, but she decides to become a deity who guides souls into the netherworld ― an ancestral figure to Korea's "mudang," or shaman.
Bari, the meaning of which is speculated to come from the Korean word for "to throw away" or "to be abandoned" ("beoreojida"), symbolizes those who have been silenced and erased. In "Community of Parting," Bari's presence is addressed, both directly and indirectly, through multiple women's voices from marginalized diasporic communities in locations such as Jeju Island, Seoul, North Korea, Japan, China, Kazakhstan, Germany and the U.S.
Ranging from those in their 30s to their late 90s, the narrators speak in Korean, English, Japanese and Russian, with their voices intertwined in a non-hierarchical way.
"I use the myth of Princess Bari as a metaphor to think about how to approach borders differently, because she, as a shaman goddess that mediates between the living and the dead, between here and there, is kind of a border figure," Kaisen explained. "And I interpreted that in relation to diaspora in 20th-century Korean history, when many forms of migration unfolded due to various sociopolitical circumstances."
One of the narrators, Kum Soni, a third-generation Zainichi Korean born and raised in Tokyo, speaks about her childhood, when she attended a school run by a small North Korean community in the city.
"It is mandatory for schoolgirls in North Korean schools to wear traditional Korean dress as a uniform. The embodiment of anti-colonial nationalism takes its form in this dress worn by female students. Whenever anti-North Korean sentiment arises in Japan, it directly results in physical violence targeted at the girls wearing this Korean dress in the streets of Tokyo," Kum utters.
Her remarks are followed by the words of Patty Ahn, a second-generation Korean-American, as she recalls her visit to Korea with her mother.
"It was the first time basically she had been back since she immigrated to the U.S. … I could see her working through 'What is my home?' Because she doesn't feel at home in the U.S. either. Watching someone at 74 going through that was a very melancholic experience."
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| Shaman Koh Sun-ahn of Jeju Island in Jane Jin Kaisen's "Community of Parting" (2019) / Courtesy of the artist |
What connects all these seemingly disparate stories, like Kum's and Ahn's, together are the scenes of "gut," or shamanic rituals, performed by Koh Sun-ahn of Jeju Island, which recur throughout the 72-minute-long film, almost like a chorus.
In a ritual, the realms of the living and the dead, this world and the otherworld, which cannot coexist in normal settings, are connected through the shaman. Similarly, in this piece, Koh acts as a mediator between disparate narratives, bringing the fragments together.
Kaisen stated that she was drawn to Jeju's shamanism, which still remains as an active part of communal life in smaller villages of the island.
"Shamans in Jeju have a quite large historical commitment to commemorating those that passed away," she said. "Shamanism was one of the only places where you could indirectly address what had happened, because the event was silenced."
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| Shaman Koh Sun-ahn in Jane Jin Kaisen's "Community of Parting" (2019) / Courtesy of the artist |
Simbang (shaman in Jeju) Koh is, in fact, a survivor of the Jeju April 3 Massacre herself, who lost her father during the incident.
According to the artist, during her ritualistic chant, Koh is able to recall and connect a remarkably wide range of historical events, from the Qing invasion of the Joseon Kingdom in 1636, to the Sewol Ferry disaster in 2014. Her invocation of the forgotten, small spirits within those historical moments is reminiscent of Kaisen's own filmic focus on suppressed individual narratives.
"The lesser spirits who were shot in war in foreign countries. Stabbed by knives, shot by small and big rifles, shot by M1 rifles during the Korean War and the Jeju April 3 Massacre … Lesser spirits at the Yeondut crossroad and the rows of tombstones people pass by...," Koh's chant goes on as the film's credits roll.
"It's a different approach to history and memory, like the naming of even the tiniest spirit of the dead, but also the grandness of history and embracing all that," Kaisen said.
But the artist does not stop at simply recognizing different forms of marginalized stories. Instead, by restoring the lost, fragmented narratives and bringing them together in her artwork, she presents the possibilities of alternative communities that can emerge, even if they are temporary ― ones that subvert the existing hierarchies between "official" historical discourses and individual narratives. In a way, they come to embody the spirit of resistance and resilience.
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| Dual-channel video installation "Braiding and Mending" (2020) by Jane Jin Kaisen / Courtesy of Art Sonje Center |
Such efforts can also be seen in the dual-channel video installation, "Braiding and Mending" (2020), a black-and-white, slow-motion clip of eight women seated in a circle to braid and fix one another's hair. The women onscreen are of several generations and portray the artist herself as well as her nieces and sisters.
Kaisen said that she sees human hair as "a trace, a signifier of memory." Then, by intimately engaging with each other's hair, which contains all past and present memories ― touching, brushing and braiding it ― the artist and her relatives visualize a community of comfort and mutual connection, despite years of having led separate lives.
"(With this piece,) I thought about this notion of times and relations. There's something about the work that minimizes the distance, which can often be part of an experience of displacement while it is also a universal sentiment. (In turn,) the piece for me signifies care and speaks to the possibility of building a relationship in the present even though there has been a gap of time in the past."
The exhibition, "Community of Parting," runs through Sept. 26 at Art Sonje Center.
