Exhibition Information

2019 (출처= 아트선재센터)

2019 (출처= 아트선재센터)

2019 (출처= 아트선재센터)

2019 (출처= 아트선재센터)

			Jane Jin Kaisen’s solo exhibition, Community of Parting centers on recent works by an artist who has focused her attention on themes such as memory, translation, and migration through long-term engagement with communities affected by war and division. Specifically, it gathers artworks protraying the the history, women, and shamanism of her ancestral island of Jeju, juxtaposing images of nature with the wreckage drawn from a cataclysmic history.

With the eponymous work Community of Parting (2019) Kaisen traces a different approach to borders by invoking the myth of Bari, who as abandoned at birth due to her gender but who eventually becomes a shaman and mediator at the threshold of the living and the dead. Rituals by shaman Koh Sunahn of Jeju Island are intertwined with the experiences of multiple Korean and diasporic women, including the artist herself. The myth of Bari is also reflected in the poetry of Mara Lee and in the poetics of Kim Hyesoon from whose book “Women, I do Poetry” the title Community of Parting derives. The 72-mintue film installation, which was first shown at the Korea Pavilion for the 2019 Venice Biennale, is shown at this exhibition across three scenes. It is present alongside other recent works such as the dual-channel video installation Braiding and Mending (2020) that shows a group of women intimately connected through their hands braiding each other’s hair, and The Pull of the Moon (2020) where ritualistic and vernacular obejcts are juxtaposed with Jeju’s natural environment during the threshold moment of the tide. Together, the works show the aesthetic vision of an artist whose practice is situated at the intersection of personal and collective memory and who is committed to tracing marginalized histories but also the possibility for fomring alternative trajectories and communities.