Jane Jin Kaisen

Many nations consider their island communities to be peripheral—a place where the habits of the mainland aren’t present. Jane Jin Kaisen shot four videos on the island of Jeju in South Korea. Core leads into Jeju’s Serpent Cave while Portal dives into the crevices in its intertidal zone. In Wreckage, underwater footage shows the ravenous sea superimposed with a propaganda film produced by the US Army in Jeju in 1945 to the sounds of a shamanic ritual lament.

In Halmang, Kaisen portrays eight elderly haenyeo sea divers—women who dive into the sea throughout the year to harvest mollusks and seaweed—on a rocky outcrop tending to rolls of sochang. Sochang, which are also featured in Kaisen’s installation Knots and Folds, are long pieces of narrow cotton cloth used in rites of passage and shamanic rituals for the sea goddess, but are used in household settings as well. The rocky lava islet depicted in Halmang serves both as a shamanistic shrine to the wind goddess and as a departure point for the dives.

Halmang is the Korean word for grandmother and also for shamanistic goddesses of Jeju, among others Seolmundae Halmang, who created the world and all life on it. Kaisen’s film grants us an intimate view of these women’s work, interweaving shamanistic practices with the solidarities the women cultivate among themselves in labor. As they tend to the long cotton, draped like a mythical creature or spiral, we witness a ritual—a choreography of slow, deliberate movements that reveals a profound spiritual connection to nature. Presenting a feminist dialogue drawn from folklore, Kaisen critiques modern society’s disregard for alternative spiritualities.

Text: Sumesh Sharma