Transmitted, embodied data is central to the underwater harvesting of the haenyeo, the ladies divers of South Korea’s Jeju Island. This apply of data sharing allowed the ladies to be on the forefront of liberation motion in the course of the Japanese occupation of Korea. Jane Jin Kaisen takes up this historical past in her exhibition “Currents,” by which her latest work, Providing—Coil Embrace, 2023, a four-channel video, commemorates the resistance. Set to the hum of the submarine singing method utilized by the fisherwomen, every display screen encompasses a separate diver, specializing in their our bodies underwater as the ladies strategy a floating coil of white cotton. This sochang, historically used for diapers or girls’s hygiene, threatens to suffocate the divers in gradual movement, and so they wrestle to struggle in opposition to each it and the pull of the bloodred seaweed.
Within the brief video Of the Sea, 2013, Kaisen walks the identical stretch of shore her grandmother, one of many haenyeo, as soon as crossed by foot every summer season. The artist’s again is loaded with fishing instruments related to people who seem within the photographic triptych Pull of the Moon, 2020. The reenactment in Of the Sea is accompanied by a haenyeo anthem written by Gywan-soon Gang, a onetime chief of the Jeju resistance who was imprisoned. It describes the ladies leaving for work, carrying their kids’s lives simply as Kaisen carries the instruments on her again. This isn’t the story of a person household however of a shared, collective existence.