Even if you managed to get to the cinema premiere of Halmang at Tate Modern last year, you should nevertheless visit Manchester for this broader perspective on Jane Jin Kaisen’s work. Note that there are some separate screenings of her Community of Parting at Manchester Metropolitan University also in January 2024.
Jane Jin Kaisen: Halmang
Manchester’s esea contemporary presents internationally acclaimed artist and filmmaker Jane Jin Kaisen in her first UK solo show ‘Halmang’. Jane Jin Kaisen was born on the volcanic island of Jeju, fifty miles south of the Korean Peninsula’s coast. In this first UK solo exhibition of her work, Jane Jin Kaisen weaves oceanic cosmology and landscape together to explore how modernisation erodes memory and loss. Featuring recent work ‘Halmang’ (2023), the exhibition intricately connects the show’s location, Manchester’s former Victorian fish market, and the artist’s ancestral ties to Jeju island, where her mother and grandmother made a living as a haenyeo sea divers harvesting seafood from the ocean.
Jane Jin Kaisen is an internationally recognised visual artist and filmmaker based in Copenhagen, Denmark and represented Korea at the 58th Venice Biennale. Her work explores themes of memory, migration, borders and translation. The solo exhibition ‘Halmang’ offers an inquiry into multiple perspectives on displacement and gendered histories. Born on Jeju Island, Kaisen was transnationally adopted to Denmark at three months old. Returning to Jeju in her adult life, Kaisen engaged with the island’s genocidal Cold War history, its natural environment and enduring spiritual culture from a multi-layered, transnational feminist lens.
Kaisen’s polyphonic moving-image works derive from extensive interdisciplinary research. The work forms an in-depth inquiry into narratives of subjective and collective loss, resilience, and the formation of alternative communities.
Accompanying screenings and archive materials of Jane Jin Kaisen’s research practice based on Jeju Island over a 10-year period will be shown alongside the film installation.
In her new film ‘Halmang’ (2023) Kaisen uses the sounds and rhythms from Jeju island’s crashing waves and songs by its haenyeo sea diving community to redefine Jeju as a movingly spiritual place, where politics and gendered social mores resonate far beyond its shores.
‘Halmang’ is filmed in the hometown of Kaisen’s grandparents by the black lava rock coast of Jeju Island adjacent to an islet that once served as a shamanic shrine for the wind goddess, Yongdeung Halmang. The word halmang in Jeju means grandmother and is also used to refer to the island’s many shamanic goddesses, augmenting the connection between woman and the spiritual realm.
In the film, Jeju haenyeo sea diving women in their 70s and 80s sit with their hands meticulously folding and connecting ‘sochang’, a white, long cotton cloth symbolising the spiral movement of spirituality and the cycle of life and death. As the film unfolds, the sochang winds around the black lava rocks in a parting embrace.
Presented in the Communal Project Space alongside books and reference material are ‘Of the Sea’ (2013) and ‘The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger’ (2010). These works further contextualise the scope of Kaisen’s practice, and provide insights into her long term investment in the political history of Jeju.
‘Of the Sea‘ (2013). In this performative video work, Kaisen retraces her mother and grandmother’s steps along the black lava rock shore holding a book written by her grandfather, former Head of the Commemoration Committee for Jeju Haenyeo’s Anti-Colonial Resistance Movement.
Composed of oral testimonies, poetry, public statements and interview fragments, ‘The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger’ (2010) explores ways in which trauma is passed on from previous generations to the present through a sense of being haunted.
Jane Jin Kaisen: Halmang was conceived by Xiaowen Zhu and curated by Dot Zhihan Jia at esea contemporary.