Kim Soyoung (Professor, Cinema Studies at Korea National University of Arts / Filmmaker)

1. The “Effervescence” of Ritual Experience and Silken Thread Diagnosis

A knot moves as if alive. It dances.
Billowing white robes, black hair
Plunging, swimming

A swirling dance beneath the waves
Untying as if loosening a knot,
Both releasing and binding
A dance of knots. Twisting like seaweed.
Yet, the will of human-beings remains unknown,
Its direction, movements—all precarious.
Up to this point, the sochang¹ knots moved like the loosened myeongsil (threads wishing for longevity), as if performing.
The “effervescence,”² captures a ritual experience.
Creating bubbles
Shivering the seaweed
A radiant song of existence

Foam, whispers of drops, floating debris
Inhalation and exhalation
Women who are able to linger long beneath the water’s surface
Yet, there is the cry of one woman.

The lament of other women dressed in white follows. The subliminal door³ opens. “Ecstatic Possession works as an index. The dramatic expressions accompanying phenomena of possession, such as the change in voice and gestures that reveal the presence of spirits, sweating and bleeding, ecstasy, paralysis, or spiritual illness.”⁴ It draws the boundary between radical experiences and immersive experiences. Conversion—one’s heart turns.

For 12 minutes, the knots are tied, twisted, and untangled, as humans and seaweed, water and knots, engage in an affective dance of push and pull. The knots and tangles intertwine as the reddish hue of the seaweed bleeds into the white sochang fabric. As the knot touches the seaweed, the term sajin⁵ might be invoked. Through this process, the pulse of the thread traces and diagnoses the unfolding history of Jeju in the Ieodo (Island Beyond the Sea) (2022–2024) series. In Wreckage (2024), for instance, we see weapons buried beneath the sea.

Cultural anthropologist Kim Seongnae explains the history of Jeju Island this way: “Jeju Island is known as the Island of Lamentation, the Island of 18,000 Shrines, or the Island of Heroic Legends. In short, it is often described with an atmosphere of sorrow and tragedy. The spiritual power of the Jeju shamans, called simbang, depends on how well they can evoke this atmosphere. This mood is rooted in historical facts. In the past, Jeju was the southernmost frontier, politically exiled and militarily isolated, facing Japan and China across distant seas. Politically, it was a place of exile for political figures or rebels. In modern times, people of Jeju endured 200 years of restrictions on leaving the island, a form of political and cultural oppression. Toward the end of the Joseon Dynasty, the island saw frequent uprisings, leading to intense conflict between the authorities and the people. More recently, the shadow of the Jeju 4.3 Massacre, which began on April 3rd, 1948, and continued through the Korean War, devastated the island, leaving a toll of lives lost and entire villages destroyed. The legacy of the massacre still lingers. Jeju muga (shamanic songs) and Shamanic epics recount the history of the island’s violent past, offering mythological texts that remember and critique these acts of violence (…)”⁶

In the aftermath of the 4.3 massacre, some of simbang were unable to recover their sons’ bodies or give them proper funerals. In the mournful muga of these simbang, the sajin of Wreckage is enacted. The knots, swaying in the water, reveal the ones of state violence and the scars of Jeju. The knots are woven by Halmang (2023), the ancestral figure, and they are intertwined with the war weapons shown in the archive footage of Wreckage. Symbolically bound in knots, these weapons are cast into the sea—a ritual act illuminated by the description above. Where the sea has become a place of dark history, the movements of the haenyeo (female divers), their flowing, whipping hair, and the knots tossed about in the water embody the rituals of remembrance.

Floating debris in the water
Passion expressed in bubbles
Ecstasy, divine energy, spiritual possession
What is being offered?
What is it that the Jeju Sea rightfully deserves as an offering?

In rituals, descent often signifies hardship, downfall, or death.
However, if this descent takes place not between heaven and earth
But beneath the sea, underwater, it might suggest an entirely new symbolic realm.

Jane Jin Kaisen’s work moves the stage beneath the ocean accompanied by camera apparatuses, equipment for underwater filming. The theory of the cinematic derived from Plato’s cave do not fully grasp the underwater world. There are few concepts addressing the moving images that occur beneath the sea. This kind of practice or performance is perhaps termed “eco/echography.”⁷ This work of eco/echography signifies moving images that contain ecology, an ecological diagnosis similar to sajin, and the resonances (echoes) that this work may invoke. The technosphere—a network of cameras, lights, and underwater apparatus—is temporarily constructed within the sea and the ritual is arranged where the life forms of the ocean thrive. The practices of the haenyeo at times reflect a state of mourning, distinct from the sense of rapture that divers may experience. In this eco/echography, natural light and artificial light interfere with one another. Through this interference and diffraction of light, the mise-en-scène of unusual underwater scenes is created in the resonance of eco/echography.

Back to Offering (2023)

A woman swims, entangled in knots of seaweed.
The knots of sochang, seaweed, bubbles, and other materials resemble the movements of a shaman’s ritual dance.
The sea feels like a peculiar sensory space wherever-moving materials overlap with immaterial sonorous energy; a sea of sensations like in the following.

“The initial movements at the first critical moment are usually linear. The body moves back and forth or side to side. As power is added to the movements and the tempo quickens, circles begin to form. The entire body spins around, drawing circles. These circles gradually shrink until the spinning at the center of the circle becomes a whirlpool.”⁸

These spinning, swirling, circular dance movements, characteristic of a shaman’s ritual dance, are emphasized by the flow of the sea, even in the absence of an actual shaman. People, knots, seaweed, and marine life create a boundary between radical experience and immersion. As the ritual and puli (unraveling, releasing) unfold underwater through the participation of the ecologically active haenyeo, a new distinction emerges between this and traditional rituals. Rituals typically have a traditional and canonical form, but Offering, Burial of This Order (2022), and Wreckage maintain the aura and mode of ritual while simultaneously passing through a process of de-ritualization, producing a tension. They break free from the matrix of signs, attempt to de-sign, devise new symbols, and return to the matrix with gestures of revolt, a renewed engagement with language, and the beginning of a new chapter. Thus, the familiar and the unknown constantly exchange places, unfolding in a continuous process that is both challenging and complex. The collaboration between the Jeju community and the artist throughout the production is a crucial aspect of this effort.

In her previous work, The Community of Parting (2019), Kaisen situates her mode of address and narrative voice within and beyond the myth of Princess Bari. “The woman who crosses the river of death, endlessly moving between the here and the beyond”⁹ is none other than Princess Bari. For Kaisen, who reframes this mythological narrative, one of the first chapters of her own personal one is adoption. Having been adopted from Korea into a Danish family, and now living in Denmark, Kaisen has returned to Jeju Island to conduct research and long-term collaborations. Her interdisciplinary practices, based on performance and translation theory, encompass experimental narrative film, photographic installations, performance, and text-based media. Her media installation work, often involving multi-channel and single-channel projects, mobilizes a technology for unraveling the folds of history, offering a prism through which fragmented stories are revealed.

In Ieodo (Island Beyond the Sea), figures such as halmang (grandmothers in Jeju), haenyeo , simbang, activists, children, along with materials like seaweed, crustaceans, and mollusks, create a virtuous cycle within and beyond works such as Wreckage, Offering, Burial of This Order, Halmang, Guardians (2024), Portal (2024), and Core (2024).

2. Dongti, Triggered and Fabulated

It is true that early artworks originated in the service of magical or religious rituals, and the aura of art has never been entirely separated from its ritualistic function. The unique value of an “authentic” artwork remains rooted in the ritual from which it originally derived its use value.¹⁰ From this perspective, Kaisen’s Ieodo (Island Beyond the Sea) series, which spans politics, history, and ecology, stands out for transcending the mere translation of “primitive forms of religious life” into audiovisual incantation.

The way Ieodo (Island Beyond the Sea) initiates rituals is by unflinchingly subverting the working of dongti (a curse incurred from disturbing forbidden things) into a fabulation of it. Traditionally, dongti refers to the misfortune brought upon by touching something that should not be disturbed. However, “dongti fabulation goes further by promoting the belief that the alienated and non-communicative relationship between humans and nature must be transformed into a harmonious, communicative one.”¹¹ By transforming “dongti” into “dongti fabulation,” Burial of This Order reconfigures the traditionally male-exclusive role of the guardian of the casket into a role performed by environmental activists, artists, members of the diaspora, queers, and trans performers, across generations and social classes. The traditional portraits or memorial images are replaced by black mirrors. Through this fabulation, which overturns the hierarchical and gendered discourses of fear surrounding dongti, the film creates socially significant moving images that “revolt”¹² against these power structures. Burial of This Order evokes the legacy of 1980s people’s art and street protests, while simultaneously subverting and reconfiguring gender roles in funeral rites and carnivalesque performances to forge a new social space. Dongti fabulation is created through the repetition of ceremonial acts that intricately reenact ritual forms, self-referential sign-making, and performative processes.¹³

In Korean ritual culture, the casket bearing in funerals, which is the most significant ritual, refers to transporting the coffin to the burial site (or cremation site) after the departure ritual. In Burial of This Order, dokkaebi (deities, goblins) appear between the casket-bearing and the burial ceremony. These dokkaebi are notorious mischief-makers, but they also bring chaos to the ritual, enabling the inversion of established order. They encounter the pallbearers, obstruct them, and roam around the abandoned resort’s rooms and other locations, sometimes tapping with long staffs.

“Du-du-eul (豆豆乙), Du-du-ri. Dudeul (to knock) relate to the dokkaebi, whose knocking is not only their nature but also their specialty: Money, come out, come out, knock knock! Rice, come out, come out, crash bang!”¹⁴

Three forces are at play here: the chaotic knocking of the dokkaebi, the funeral in Burial of This Order, and the conventional funeral order with mourning garments and pall-bearing tools. These three forces—power and counter-authority—shape the mise-en-scène, generating movement and disruption.”

Without much ado, Instead of lowering the coffin into the grave, they hurl it down into the ruins. Leading up to this moment, the air is filled with chants and shouts of revolt, defiance, and rejection. After a sequence that feels as though the black waters have swallowed everything, we see the shattered coffin. The mourners, having shed their mourning clothes for everyday attire, now weave knots instead of bearing the coffin. The sochang knots in Ieodo (Island Beyond the Sea) pointing to the cyclical nature of history and the natural world, as well as the entanglement and unraveling of wounds and internal struggles. These knots connect the external and internal while also delineating the boundary between them, an index of “the exteriority within” phenomenon. In the digital age, threads, sochang, and knots might find resonance with programming “threads” as well. The liquidity of the ritual filming underwater, naturally dramatized, fits Nadia Bozak’s definition of ecology: “It is impossible to say where nature stops and culture begins, or vice versa.”¹⁵

3. Eco/Echography and Knots

The knots in Ieodo (Island Beyond the Sea), contrasting with the liquidity of the sea, are a central material touching on topics from psychology to shamanistic studies. In his book Knots, R. D. Laing explores the complexities of human relationships and psychology, using metaphors like knots, tangles, fankles, impasses, disjunctions, whirligigs, and binds to describe psychological phenomena in a poetic way.¹⁶ These terms illustrate how psychological intricacies can be condensed as knots. In the structure of feelings of Korea, knots are understood in this way. “Resentment and its resolution are often expressed through metaphors involving strings, threads, and ties. In the Korean dictionary, a knot is defined as ‘something tied in a loop, such as a ribbon, that is difficult to untangle.’ The knot goes beyond being a metaphor for resentment and becomes a metaphor for life itself.”¹⁷ In this way, the knots woven by Halmang discern and diagnose Jeju and the Jeju Sea in Offering and Wreckage, much like the process of feeling a pulse through threads (sajin). Jeju is both a condensed symptom of Korea’s modern and contemporary history and an ecosystem. It brings forth discussions of state violence, dark tourism, and the destruction of the marine ecosystem by the Gangjeong military base.

In this context, the knots become powerful material that might embody the ghostly entanglements of new materialism and hauntology.¹⁸ Here, the knots are a peculiar material that traverses between ritualistic practices, including shamanism, and the ghostly entanglements of new materialism, touching on hauntology. As previously mentioned, when knots operate underwater, the sea makes the temporary boundaries they create ripple, amplifying their liquidity. In this cosmic flow of knots, haenyeo who perform Offering behaving like a certain medium beneath the water.

The term “maechae” (媒體), which translates as “media,” is composed of two Chinese characters: “媒” (matchmaker) and “體” (body or substance). While the Sino-Korean term maechae and the word media overlap to some extent, maechae can also refer to non-electronic, physical, and material mediums. Interestingly, the radical of “媒” is “女” (woman), linking the term to words like maepa (媒婆, matchmaker) and yeongmae (靈媒, spiritual medium, shaman). This suggests that maechae (media), in this sense, serves as for the intangible, evoking the image of the shaman as an intermediary between the physical and metaphysical worlds. Following this thread, Kaisen’s Ieodo (Island Beyond the Sea) layers Félix Guattari’s three ecologies of mental, social, and environmental into her work, circulating and intertwining them within the space of shamanistic rituals.¹⁹ Here, ecology is defined not just as an environmental but also as a framework that includes social relationships and human subjectivity. Guattari argues that the ecological crisis threatening the planet is a direct result of the new forms of capitalism and stresses the need for eco-sophy that pays an attention to the differences between all life systems. In these three ecologies, Ieodo (Island Beyond the Sea) unfolds the process of “space-time-materialization”²⁰ in the works like Portal and Core. They create a usual and sublime landscape through ancient crustacean fossils and porous lava rock. Their immense presence combined with the steady beat of rocks produces a deep sense of awakening. In these two works, the legend of “the virgin offered as a sacrifice and the curse bestowed upon the magistrate who saved her” transforms into a shamanistic myth of Jeju’s great goddess, Seolmundae Halmang who breathes life into and sets the universe in motion.

Moreover, the locations re-invoked as Portal and Core are closely tied to the scenes in Wreckage, where the sea is disturbingly treated as a dumping ground for large quantities of weapons, much like a landfill. These scenes provoke reflection on the concept of “resilience.”²¹ C. S. Holling views small-scale revolt and remembrance as the key capabilities of ecological recovery. In Wreckage, Core, Portal, and Offering, thoughts and senses around small-scale change and remembrance are triggered, and the resilience of the villages and seas of Jeju, where nature and history are enmeshed, becomes evident. These places, marked by dark blue-black formations of rough basalt whose cracks lead to a portal entering the inner world of seashells, connect to the resilience of Jeju’s seas and villages. Through the Ieodo (Island Beyond the Sea) series, the change and memory involved in nature’s and history’s counter-movements are captured, expressed as an art of memory (mnemotechnologie). This manifests and resonates through the eco/echography of sajin (the diagnostic silken threads).

In Guardians, the kokdu (wooden figurines traditionally used to guide the dead in funerals) are no longer standing at the pinnacle of the casket to watch over the deceased, but are instead held in the hands of children, circling in the ganggangsullae (circle dance). In this fleeting moment, the kokdu stand as guardians of both death’s finality and the deceased’s passage, while their gaze stretches beyond—toward life, the afterlife, and the sphere of possibility and future. It is this vibrant futurity that Ieodo (Island Beyond the Sea) holds in promise.”²²

1. The traditional sochang knot was produced by farmers during the agricultural off-season using a loom. After purchasing cotton thread, they would undergo a process of spinning, winding, warping, and weaving before selling their products in the market. While household production was small—around five or six rolls—it provided significant income for farming families. Sochang was also widely used in shamanic and Buddhist rituals. In shamanic rites, sochang symbolizes a bridge between the living and the dead or the trials of life. See Jangsik Jang and Nara Kim, Ganghwa’s Textiles, Sochang: A Survey Report on Modern and Contemporary Lifestyle Culture (Seoul: National Folk Museum of Korea, 2019).

2. A term from Emile Durkheim. Roy Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, Korean trans. Daehoon Kang (Seoul: Bullsbook, 2017), 9.

3. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Korean trans. Jaeyoung Kim (Paju: Hangilsa, 2000), 38.

4. Seongnae Kim, Cultural Anthropology of Korean Shamanism (Goyang: Sonamu, 2018), 560.

5. Sajin (絲診) is a practice in traditional Korean medicine where the doctor holds the end of a thread connected to the pulse to diagnose by feeling its texture. This was traditionally done through a wall, so the doctor would not have to touch or face the woman directly, reflecting a gender-biased method of diagnosis. However, for Ieodo (Island Beyond the Sea), I seek to reappropriate and activate the concept of sajin to establish the methodology of approaching and producing the phenomenon through knots.

6. Seongnae Kim, 163–164. It describes the style in which Jeju shamanism exists as a historical discourse, reflecting the Island’s unique local history.

7. “Echography” is a term primarily used in the medical field, referring to a method for diagnosing internal conditions of the body that are difficult to discern with the naked eye, such as the state of a foetus in a pregnant woman’s womb or the condition of the inside of the eye, using high-frequency sound waves. It is commonly translated as ultrasound diagnosis or ultrasound angiography. Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler expanded upon this medical meaning by incorporating the concept of echo reverberation in their discussions of television. Here, the term echo is combined with eco, implying ecological significance and the meaning of eco-geography, carrying multiple, layered meanings. The suffix “-graphy” encompasses meanings of “to write,” “to record,” or “to express.” For more detailed discussion of “echography,” including ecological geography, ecological moving images, diagnostic images, and echoes, see Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television, Korean trans. Jaehee Kim and Taewon Jin (Seoul: Minumsa, 2002), 10–16.

8. Yeolgyu Kim, Puli (Seoul: ViaBook, 2012), 64.

9. Hyesoon Kim, Women, Doing Poetry (Seoul: Moonji, 2017), 43.

10. See the essay by Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935).

11. Sinjeong Kim, “Ecological Discourse in the Dongti tale,” Semiotic Studies, vol. 75 (2023): 7–36. A common understanding of dongti can be seen in the film Exhuma (2024), where a laborer suffers from dongti after damaging a human-like figure during grave excavation.

12. Borrowing from C. S. Holling’s concepts of “revolt” and “remember.” Refer to footnote 21.

13. Roy Rappaport, 69–146.

14. Yeolgyu Kim, True Nature of Dokkaebi, Horned Koreans (Paju: Sakyejul, 2010), 42.

15. Nadia Bozak, The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 15.

16. From the book flap of R.D. Laing’s Knots (New York, NY: Pantheon, 1970).

17. Yeolgyu Kim, Puli, 41.

18. Karen Barad, “Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come,” Derrida Today 3.2 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 240–268.

19. Felix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: Athlone Press, 2001), 6–17.

20. Karen Barad, 240–268.

21. See Lance H. Gunderson and C. S. Holling, Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2002). C. S. Holling’s concept of resilience differs fundamentally from the traditional notion of engineering stability. While engineering stability emphasizes a system’s return to equilibrium after a disturbance, Holling’s ecological resilience focuses on a system’s capacity to absorb disturbances, reorganize, and adapt while preserving its core functions and structures. Applying these concepts directly to artwork can be difficult, so I translate them into the realms of mnemotechnologie (art of memory) or eco/echography.

22. Soyoung Kim, “Modernity in Suspense: The Logic of Fetishism in Korean Cinema,” Korean Cinema in Global Contexts: Postcolonial Phantom, Blockbuster and Trans Cinema (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022). In book chapter, Kim Soyoung analyzes director Kim Ki-young’s Ieodo (1977), where Ieodo points to a heterotopia—a fictional island, Parangdo—where three elements are condensed and contested: fetich, modern commodity capitalism, and shamanistic rituals and pre-modern belief systems.

Chus Martínez (Head, Institute Art Gender Nature, Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW)

I.

We no longer know what stage of capitalism we are in. Is it possible to call something that continues to evolve, following an increasingly savage logic late capitalism? In countries like Korea—and Spain is counted in that group—capitalism had a stellar moment. These countries went from widespread poverty to a democracy that was growing, thanks to the economic “engine” constituted by a growing urban working class, a human machine motivated by the promise of improvement, greater agency, and greater participation in nation-building. My grandmother recounted the total abandonment of traditional ways of life by the mass flight of the younger generation to the cities. They only returned in summer with new ideas, unusual clothes, and the need to buy household appliances galore. There had never been a fridge in their house. Food, scarce and precious at many times in their lives, was preserved using traditional methods: drying, salting, and fermenting. The large fridge-freezer that presided over her wonderful traditional kitchen, a gift from my parents, was empty most of the time. One very hot summer morning, my mother wanted to use the fridge, but all the shelves were occupied by well-made packages of something wrapped in brown paper. Surprised and somewhat alarmed, she asked her mother if she could move the packages and put the fruit in so that it would stay fresh. Her answer was blunt: “No. I have never liked the effect of the cold in the fridge on food; it’s like it’s anesthetized. It doesn’t taste like anything.” When asked about the packets, my grandmother replied, “They are sheets. The fridge is perfect for keeping sheets fresh on these summer days. A great invention.”

Jane Jin Kaisen’s work must be interpreted from the perspective of her desire to interrupt the logic of the prevailing economic and value systems of a society—in her case, Korea—in order to begin the narrative from another point of view. These interruptions—such as putting the sheets in the fridge—are gestures that modify the trajectory of not only human thought but also our perception of the world. We have the idea that reality is a steady substance perceived by us in a constant way. However, reality is more vulnerable than we think. It is a plastic substance capable of changing shape just through our gaze. A contemplation more akin to dreaming is capable of working miracles, opening doors and windows in the real world, in the matter of the world we know so well, to facilitate the emergence of other worlds. The creation of the conditions capable of making us feel vividly that this world is possessed by all the previous and future worlds, by their voices, rituals, characters, and symbols, is a constant in Kaisen’s work—and I would say, also the mission of her work.

II.

Seven of her video works, creating a spiral, are presented in the exhibition: Wreckage (2024), Guardians (2024), Halmang (2023), Burial of this Order (2022), Offering (2023), Portal (2024), and Core (2024). These works can be viewed separately but form an organic unit. As with ancient hand-scroll paintings, each motif can be understood independently in its context, but the overall ambition of the grand scene that these scroll paintings present before our eyes can be seen in all its glory when the totality is revealed. Kaisen’s works move fluidly between the narrative characteristics of telling a story through consecutive images, featuring characteristics of ancient Asian art, while also retaining elements of Western art. In the West, once paintings are hung on a wall, they can be viewed permanently. Her videos share the same quality and can be seen as representations of scenes in an individual and autonomous way. At the same time, when viewed together, the totality creates a spiral—a kind of ceremonial transition from one video to the next—leaving viewers with the possibility of constructing the scene in their own way. There is no prescribed order for viewing the works. Our way of moving through the space creates a sense of order, but we can reinterpret it at our discretion, again and again. All of these works are centered on Jeju, a rather big island located in the Korea Strait. Emerging from a volcano, Core faces us with the “cavity,” the Serpent Cave, which, like a woman’s womb, gives life to the Island. Portal, as a counterpart, refers to the force that beats at the heart of every life form, as well as the Goddess Seolmundae Halmang and the creation myth of Jeju. History follows after its birth.

Wreckage depicts Jeju and its traumatic history during World War II; Halmang refers to the Goddess of the Wind, Yeongdeung Halmang, and her protective powers towards the women sea divers, the haenyeo; Guardians portrays another generation—children around the volcanic landscape of Jeju, playing with votive figures that protect and guide the dead; Offering takes us into the waters of Jeju, where a rite of transformation is performed in the sea; Burial of this Order leads us through a funeral procession for all the orders we humans have disrupted and all the worlds we have broken. Each work prompts us to look in detail and observe the power of remembering and feeling the pain of the past in the present while paying attention to the beliefs and rituals that serve as landmarks of respect to the natural order and support for the community. It also allows us to acknowledge the functional myths that remind us of our vulnerability and of the ancient origin of the first human settlements in a place like Jeju, as well as the importance of re-enacting and performing our bonds with the natural elements in that place. Jeju emerges through the work of Kaisen as a particular repository of our thoughts about our place and our role as a species on this planet. Jeju was formed as the result of an underwater volcanic eruption more than two million years ago. It possesses a special status in the minds of Koreans. It was an independent country at first—it was later invaded by the Mongolian Empire that introduced the ponies, before being returned to the power of the Goryeo Dynasty that shaped Korea for about a thousand years, and then being colonized by Japan in 1910 until it became an independent province in 1946. Jeju, though, independently of its factual history, represents a very needed otherness and a counterpart to the mainland. Jeju is a real place with real struggles of maintaining a balance of traditions and a balance with nature while facing continuous and growing exploitation, tourism, as well as the capitalization of all that is precious and sacred for a specific community. Jeju is also the land of women divers. It is extremely interesting how the existence of a community of women working at sea at its core creates a different perception of age and gender. The unusual and incredible strength of these women, both young and old alike, allows them to perform these tasks, culminating in the very idea of “inheritance.” Inheritance is the name we give to the legitimization of the source we want to be part of. Women are usually not placed at the center of that source. Mothers give birth to their children, yet it is fathers who receive the honors of inheritance. Jeju changes the symbolic meaning of the narrative by creating new etymologies that stem from feminine divinities—the goddess of the sea and wind that embraces us, the mother of fire that sleeps within the volcano, and the women divers embody this symbolism. It is extraordinary how the presence of women in the arduous work of shellfishing and spearfishing is capable of transforming the understanding of an entire community. I belong to one of the few cultures on the northwest coast of Spain where women catch precious barnacles by tying themselves to the rocks of the cliffs. The origin of women’s presence in these jobs is uncertain, but we certainly owe it to a great demand. Women capable of overcoming the immense force of a hard, cold, dark ocean with strong currents, who are also adept at maneuvering the risky paths along the cliffs, are at the origin of the change in mentality. If patriarchal culture sees women as passive beings, waiting for someone to come along and marry them, or are at the mercy of their fathers and brothers with no autonomy over their lives, the women of the sea in Jeju are active agents of change and mediators of that major conversation we must have with the natural world.

III.

Jeju is the epitome of otherness. The strength of Kaisen’s work lies in her ability to capture this dimension. Her work creates extremely powerful images because it focuses on a peculiar trait: not on the images’ ability to show or represent, but on their ability to bring something to life––specifically, the ability to breathe life into past images, mental images, dreamed images, or desired images. Her moving images ooze vivacity. This ability is paradoxically more akin to poets and poetry than to film or video art––paradoxically in the sense that moving images tend to show the reality of the world rather than recreate a certain world energy. However, Kaisen’s work has a particular fondness for intense images, extremely vivid colors, and the creation of contrasts between all substances that appear in these images: the earth, the air, the water, and the bodies. The rhythm—emphasized by the music, a sound production that shapes an image environment, making it seem like a vivid daydream—has an ultimate motive: to serve as a support for the generation of new stories. How many “Jejus” exist? Can we exhaust a place and its potential through storytelling? Or, on the contrary, the more we “extract” from it, the more the place is prone to generate unusual and surprising stories and myths. As I mentioned at the beginning of my text, we are at a point in the system of economic excess and value creation where we need a different approach to the relationships that shape and configure our lives—extracting from nature to produce and consume, versus the creation of a discipline, a ritual, a performance capable of redirecting our desire to possess, and the greed drive. We also have to control the greed drive of capitalism through a new way of looking at the world. In Kaisen’s videos, the appearance of sochang, a white cotton cloth, serves as a thread that guides our bodies and minds along this new path of different and intense interpersonal connections—a thread of cloth that unites all participants in communion. The thread symbolizes an umbilical cord; the ocean symbolizes the placenta; and the white cloth represents purity. It shows the possibility of starting the cycles of life again following a different logic. Through this fabric and the way the camera is moving, the energy that is created and distributed throughout all the works is ring-shaped, generative, and open. It is important to note that in all these works, there is no dialogue, and the characters do not speak to each other. Instead, connections through touch, the rustle of the wind, the skin, facial expressions, the movement of the body, water, vegetation, the sky, figures moved by children, images rescued from the archive, voices, ancestral songs, and intense sounds—all become sources of eloquence except for the human voice in communication. The feeling of being alive yet in another world and the ability to grasp our place and understand the meaning of coexisting with other beings and life forms are at the center of Kaisen’s work. Words and dialogues would push us out of this dimension and transport us into the realm of the human species—the only one that expresses itself in this way. Nature chants, and we chant, too. Nature moves, and we move, too. Nature kills, and we kill, too. Nature performs rituals, and so do we. The work serves as a fabric, intertwining sensory powers irreducible to the five senses of humans.

Ⅳ.

Intensity is a trait associated with affection. Affection is the capacity of a body to affect and be affected. The very display of the works in the space highlights a feature that is present in all the works: they root and unite. To root means to connect to a place by diving deep into what this place may represent in terms of the things that matter in life. To connect is the act of linking bodies and synchronizing their ways of perceiving and feeling, creating a sense of trust and warmth that we immediately perceive as rewarding and worthwhile. As with medieval altarpieces in Europe or hand-scroll paintings in Asia, the work of Kaisen forms a grand vision of a world through the creation of scenes that may seem independent of each other, but belong together. The crises of language and representation can be addressed by revealing real alternatives and embracing other languages. We need to find places where we can anchor the desire for a sense of dignity, relevance, and a language that finally embodies generosity towards life, freeing us from the dynamics of destruction and violence that surround us. Jeju is one such place—a place that needs to be built. It is also an ideal, not only a specific geographical location. Jeju is also a method that shows us a connection between wide-ranging knowledge, generations of people, myths, rituals, and the wisdom of the Oceans and Earth that constitute our home and provides an associative philosophy that may give birth to hope.

The work of Kaisen offers a contrasting model to the model of life we all are in. Her artistic language alludes to the past, but it is not nostalgic for it. It takes into account the crimes committed in the past but is not undisturbed by them either. Her work embodies change, but it is not merely about transformation—it is about a partial change of attitude and behavior that will slowly make a difference. Her work is also about mutation—the possibility of the appearance of another reality, shattering what we altogether perceive to be real, and entering another dimension. It is, at its core, a technological work—one that believes in the power of a code capable of generating another reality. We can easily comprehend this when it is applied to AI, but we need to understand that art, performance, and moving images capturing this force also constitute a code capable of leading to the emergence of a world so big that it may displace the existing world. Just like in sci-fi movies, or how lines of a beautiful poem displace the status quo to emerge and make space for themselves. This is the force that holds all these seven works together. The number “seven” has been used since ancient times to create a code, a symbolic language, capable of signalizing that the sum of all these forces, myths, and references to the spiritual realm, is not only a metaphorical force—it also has a real agency in the present. They represent the possibility of creating a connectivity with the real, spiraling from the outside world into the inner of the human mind to create an awareness and enlightenment of how to live better, from now on. The seven works, forming a spiral, represent an evolution and growth of the spirit that must have an effect on our decision-making, values, and goals.

Let me have no shame
Under the heaven till I die.²

1. Lines of the poem Prelude by Yun Dong-ju.

2. Lines of the poem Prelude by Yun Dong-ju