Halmang at esea contemporary is Jane Jin Kaisen’s debut UK solo exhibition, curated by Dot Zhihan Jia. It centres around a new moving-image work which follows a group of eight women in their seventies and eighties who make a living as haenyeo – a community of female sea divers – on the volcanic island of Jeju, located fifty miles off the Korean peninsula. Alongside ‘Halmang’ (2023), esea presents two earlier films by Kaisen, ‘Of The Sea’ (2013) and ‘The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger’ (2010). Combined, these works spin around themes of migration, loss, displacement and identity, which is intricately tied to the artist’s own life and her personal connection to the island of Jeju.
Jeju is the birthplace of Kaisen and an island that has suffered a violent political history. Following the thirty-five year Japanese colonial occupation of Korea, the US defeat of Japan at the end of World War Two resulted in the division of Korea into North and South, and US military occupation of Jeju. Islanders rebelled against the division of Korea and the state reaction resulted in a massacre costing an estimated 30,000 lives. Jeju therefore represents a key site in the conflict between the political left and right in Korea and remains subject to ongoing processes of militarisation, land dispossession and historical trauma.
Kaisen herself was transnationally adopted as an infant and grew up in Denmark, and has made returning to Jeju a recurring subject in her work. Like the location, her own identity and the identities of others featured in her films often embody sites of unsettlement and unresolve. Kaisen’s treatment of Jeju, of the island’s culture, and of her own identity, inhabits a productive space, somewhere in-between grief, exclusion, honouring resistance, endurance and community.
These themes are ushered in sonically by the conflicting sounds of crashing waves and resistance songs as you walk around the gallery. ‘Of The Sea’ (2013) is presented just inside the entrance to esea and plays out the once-banned Song of the Haenyeo. This short film acts as a curt pretext to the artist’s latest work and the context of the exhibition. It features Kaisen making her way over the black lava coastline, retracing her mother’s and grandmother’s steps to the sea where they made a living as haenyeo. But dressed in heels and untrained in their ways, the artist trips and fumbles over the rocks. Though she attempts to feel a connection to her maternal lineage, her movements and choice of modern clothing signal perhaps the dissonance she feels towards this part of her ancestry and seems also to form a visual image for the erosion of Jeju culture under modernisation.
Haenyeo, translating as ‘sea women’, has traditionally been a lifelong profession for females on the island, with divers training as young girls and passing knowledge on to their daughters. As a group, they are figures of female strength, as the Women Divers Anti-Japanese Movement of 1930, involving more than 10,000 haenyeo, was one of the largest ever national resistance movements by women. It is now, however, a threatened profession, as fewer women are inclined to follow the tradition – one now included on the UNESCO list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
‘Halmang’, the exhibition’s central film, is a choreography of the female divers sitting on the black lava rocks, as they tie and fold lengths of a white cotton cloth – sochang – with practised hands. The camera dwells on weathered skin and firm, independent expressions. In Korean culture, sochang symbolises the cycle of life and death and the spiral of spirituality, as the cloth that mothers wrap new-borns in and cover the dead. The cloth also ties in further connections between the haenyeo and shamanic traditions, and customs which honour nature. As a community of women, the film looks towards the haenyeo as pillars of resistance and endurance, as vessels for generations to understand and process collective trauma through their shared rituals and practices.
The exhibition’s third film, ‘The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger’, is presented in the opening space of the gallery. Seventy-two minutes in length, the film is a composition of testimonies, archival and curated footage, public statements, poetry fragments and interviews. It explores the system of transnational adoption, told largely through the experiences of female adoptees of the Korean diaspora.
Of central concern to the film is how identity is produced through the experiences and circumstances of international adoptees. Discursive in its approach, Kaisen raises into dialogue the testimonies and experiences, woven through with wider academic debate, so that the film delivers a cross-section of international adoption on a personal and global level. It describes the history of how transnational adoption was initiated after the Korean War, owing to a large number of orphaned children, and was fuelled in part by a belief that English language and a Western education were a privilege that would give children greater prospects. In tone, it sways towards scrutiny, such as when it tells of the lies told to birth parents by adoption agencies, the struggles undergone by adoptees to obtain legal rights and full citizenship, or when it points to the economics of international adoption – building a picture which is more exploitative than humanitarian.
The films seem to abstract the process of identity formation, particularly the way that for adoptees, identity is stripped, imposed, internalised, contingent, always dependent on the state to give and take away. Archival footage looks at the pageantry of a performance of ‘Koreanness’ by young Korean adoptees in America. Personal narratives describe how they find themselves feeling an outsider in their adopted country, only to then feel a rejection from the cultures and customs of their birth country. Like the island of Jeju, the adoptees seem held in a lifelong state of unsettlement.
Kaisen’s approach to personal narrative and culture is like that of an ethnographer. The exhibition gives a strong sense of the rigorous research which underpins Kaisen’s work through the supporting displays of books and archival materials, making the works feel as informative as they are visually poetic. Books published by Kaisen, academics, personal memoirs and photographs allow viwers to dive deeper into Kaisen’s process, Overall, the works find a delicate and complex balance between documenting, poeticising and performing, and there is an activism and interventionism tangible throughout. As an attempt at understanding the politics of identity and belonging, Halmang is haunting and moving.
Jane Jin Kaisen: Halmang at esea contemporary, 20 January – 23 June 2024
Natalie Russett is a writer based in Manchester.
This review is supported by esea contemporary.
Published 02.04.2024 by Jazmine Linklater in Reviews
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