Jane Jin Kaisen

In an abandoned resort on the South Korean island of Jeju, a group of people perform a symbolic funeral ritual to end a world built on hierarchies, division and destruction.

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Strange Meetings

The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger explores ways in which trauma is passed on from previous generations to the present through a sense of being haunted. Following a group of international adoptees and other women of the Korean diaspora in their 20s and 30s, the film uncovers how the return of the repressed confronts and destabilizes narratives that have been constructed to silence histories of pain and violence inflicted onto the bodies and lives of women and children.

The video installation Halmang (2023) revolves around a group of eight women in their 70s and 80s who have made a living together for most of their lives as haenyeo. A black lava rock islet was once a shamanic shrine for the wind goddess Yeongdeung Halmang. In Kaisen’s poignant visual imagery, the women’s hands meticulously fold and connect sochang — long white cotton pieces of cloth symbolising the spiral movement of spirituality and the cycle of life and death. As the video unfolds, the sochang winds around the islet like a parting embrace.