Experience Kaisen's installed artworks, Apertures/Specters/Rifts (2016) and Strange Meetings (2017) and reserve seats to screenings of two of her films,The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger, (2010) and Community of Parting (2019) as part of the Asia North Arts Festival 2022.
Community of Parting traces a different approach to borders, translation, and aesthetic mediation by invoking the ancient shamanic myth of the Abandoned Princess Bari and engaging female Korean shamanism as an ethics and aesthetics of memory and mutual recognition across time and space.
Rooted in oral storytelling and embodied by female shamans, the myth about Bari and her abandonment at birth for being born a girl has been mainly understood as a story of filial piety. However, Kaisen frames the myth as an initial story of gender transgression that transcends division logics but has the experience of othering and loss at its core. According to the myth, Bari regains the community’s acceptance after reviving the dead and is offered half the Kingdom. Yet, the heroine refuses to abide by human borders and chooses instead to become the goddess who mediates at the threshold of the living and the dead.
Community of Parting derives from Kaisen’s extensive research into Korean shamanism since 2011 and her long-term engagement with communities effected by war and division. The piece is composed of imagery filmed in locations such as Jeju Island, the DMZ, South Korea, North Korea, Kazakhstan, Japan, China, the United States, and Germany. Combining shamanic ritual performances, nature -and cityscapes, archival material, aerial imagery, poetry, voiceover, and soundscapes, the piece is configured as a multi-scalar, non-linear, and layered montage loosely framed around Bari’s multiple deaths.
Both inter-subjective and deeply personal, Kaisen treats the myth of the abandoned as a gendered tale of migration, marginalization, and resilience told from a multi-vocal site. In the shamanic ritual the shaman abandons herself to mediate and gathers an assembly of the living, the dead, and multiple spirits witnesses. In a similar vein, a Community of Parting is formed in the piece around the shared sentiment of the abandoned: Ritual performances and chants by shaman Koh Sunahn, a survivor of the 1948 Jeju Massacre in South Korea constitutes a recurring rhythm and culminates in a ritual for the dead that involves the artist. The myth is also reflected in the poetry of Swedish poet Mara Lee and in the poetics of Kim Hyesoon from whose book ‘Woman, I Do Poetry’ the translated title Community of Parting derives. It further resonates in various narratives by South Korean, North Korean, and diasporic women who negotiate how gender bias along with colonialism, modernity, and war have resulted in radical ruptures while unfinished histories continue to linger.
Infused by the living, the dead, and those yet to come, Community of Parting is actualized through a process of dissolution, revival, and becoming. Informed by shamanic practice, properties integral to the filmic medium are employed to contest and diffuse spatiotemporal boundaries and hierarchies of knowledge and being. Doing so, Community of Parting proposes other ways of thinking and being with others, including the relationship to nature and other life-forms.
Photo by Daniel Zox
Jane Jin Kaisen (born in on the Jeju Island, South Korea) is a visual artist living in Copenhagen who works with video installation, experimental film, photographic installation, performance, and text. Her artistic practice is informed by extensive interdisciplinary research and engagement with diverse communities. Her work is best known for its visually striking, performative, and feminist qualities in which past and present are brought into dialogue with each other. Engaging topics such as memory, migration, border theory, and translation, she activates the field where subjective experience and embodied knowledge intersect with larger political histories. Jin Kaisen will join the Center for Advanced Media Studies as well as the initiative on “Building Anti-Racist Coalitions and Intersectional Knowledge in the Face of Anti-Asian Violence” at Johns Hopkins for an artist residency in 2022.
Critical Responses to Anti-Asian Violence (CRAAV) is a scholarly and community-oriented initiative to build anti-racist coalitions across Johns Hopkins University and Baltimore. It takes anti-Asian violence as a site where we can develop intersectional frameworks to engage the heterogeneous challenges facing Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities and interrogate the effects of white supremacy on academic knowledge produced about minoritized communities.
Asia North celebrates the arts and Asian culture that are defining characteristics of Baltimore’s Charles North neighborhood, part of the Station North Arts and Entertainment District. Inaugurated in spring 2019, Asia North is a collaborative community celebration that recognizes, showcases, and honors the art, culture and the Asian heritage of Greater Baltimore, especially the Korean history of Baltimore’s Charles North community. The Asian Arts & Culture Center co-produces events with the Central Baltimore Partnership, and multiple community partners. Area artists and organizations present exhibits, performances, films, and more. In spring 2020, the programs expanded to online formats.
COVID-19 Safety Note
As of Saturday, January 8, 2022, the SNF Parkway requires all participants to be fully vaccinated with a COVID-19 vaccine that is approved by the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization to attend screenings. Additionally, all patrons are required to wear masks when inside the SNF Parkway building. Patrons experiencing any COVID-19 symptoms are encouraged to stay home.