Community of Parting traces a different approach to borders, translation, and artistic expression by invoking the ancient Korean shamanic myth of the abandoned princess Bari and employing 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 legend of Bari and her abandonment at birth for being a girl is mainly understood as a story of filial piety. However, Kaisen frames the myth as a founding story of gender transgression that transcends the logic of division, 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 as a reward. Yet, the heroine refuses to abide by human borders and instead chooses to become the goddess who mediates at the threshold of the living and the dead. This is what distinguishes the myth of the abandoned Bari from other Korean myths about women.
Community of Parting draws on Kaisen’s extensive research since 2011 into Korean shamanism and her long-term engagement with communities affected by war and division. The piece features imagery filmed in various locations including Jeju Island, the DMZ, South Korea, North Korea, Kazakhstan, Japan, China, the United States, and Germany. Combining shamanic ritual performance, nature and cityscapes, archival material, aerial imagery, poetry, voiceover, and soundscapes, the work is configured as a multi-scalar, nonlinear, and layered montage loosely framed around Bari’s multiple deaths.
            Both intersubjective and deeply personal in her approach, 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 in order to mediate, gathering an assembly of the living, the dead, and multiple spirit witnesses. In a similar vein, a “community of parting” is formed in the piece around the shared sentiments of the abandoned. Ritual performance and chants by shaman Koh Soon Ahn, a survivor of the 1948 Jeju Uprising and Massacre in South Korea, constitutes a recurring rhythm and culminates in a ritual for the dead that involves the artist and her own personal abandonment. 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. In doing so, Community of Parting proposes other ways of thinking and being with others, including our relationship to nature and other life-forms.

Jane Jin Kaisen is a visual artist born in Jeju Island, South Korea, and adopted by Danish parents in 1980. She currently lives in Berlin and Copenhagen. Working across different media—film, video installation, photography, and performance—she engages themes of memory, migration, and gender through poetic modes of storytelling and non-linear montages of image, sound, voice, and embodiment. Recent exhibitions include 2 or 3 Tigers (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2017), Forum Expanded (68th Berlin International Film Festival, 2018), Decolonizing Appearance (CAMP: Center for Art on Migration Politics, Copenhagen, 2018), Asian Diva: The Muse and The Monster (Buk Seoul Museum of Art, 2017), Art Spectrum 2016 (Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul), Interrupted Survey: Fractured Modern Mythologies (Asia Culture Center, Gwangju, 2015). She was awarded the Montana Enterprize at Kunsthallen Brandts in Denmark, and has participated in the Liverpool Biennale, the Gwangju Biennale, and the Jeju Biennale, among others. Kaisen has an MFA from UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) and an MA from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and participated in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.