The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger
Jane Jin Kaisen
Friday, June 3rd - Sunday, June 26th, 2011
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger is an endeavor to re-think dominant narratives of international adoption from South Korea to the United States and Europe by situating international adoption within a longer history of military and patriarchal violence against women and children. The film spans from the era of Japanese colonization of South Korea from 1910-1945, to the emergence of the Cold War, through South Korea’s militarized modernity, and the permanent installment of US hegemony in South Korea from the 1950s onwards. The film explores how bio-political violence onto women’s and children’s bodies have been mobilized for national security and economic growth and became central in geopolitical negotiations between South Korea, the United States, and Japan. This part of world history has been systematically silenced, but largely due to efforts of the ‘diaspora’ it is beginning to surface and counter dominant narratives in South Korea and in the West.
In The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger a genealogy is created by relating the stories of three generations of women: firstly, the around 200,000 former comfort women from various countries in Asia who were subjected to military sexual slavery by the Japanese military between World War I and II, secondly, the around one million women who have worked as sex-workers around US military bases in South Korea from the 1950s, and thirdly, the around 200,000 children who were adopted from South Korea to the West from the 1950s to the present.
Instead of trying to create a genealogy based on national identification, biological, or ethnic ties, the genealogy constructed in the film is a strategic and political one. It looks at the ways in which several generations of women were affected by similar oppressive regimes while accounting for the multiple subjectivities and different issues at stake.
By portraying the shared desire for recognition, reconciliation, and reparation, it is the hope that further strategic alliances can be formed in order to confront and dismantle the mechanisms and ideologies that enabled this systematic silencing.
The Woman, The Orphan, and the Tiger is primarily shaped around conversations with a collective of people extending over a prolonged period of time rather than from a scripted narrative. It follows a group of women in their 20s and 30s engaged in the growing international adoptee and broader Korean Diaspora community. Through their writings, filmmaking, and activism, they have significantly contributed to a critical rethinking of identity politics, ethics, and human rights. Taking outset in this present generation women artists, scholars, and activists, The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger looks at the legacy of international adoption from a feminist perspective within a trans-generational and transnational scope. It explores the ways in which trauma is passed on from previous generations to the present through a sense of being haunted by repressed histories. It further points to the politics involved in search and how the physical return of the Diaspora confronts and de-stabilizes narratives that have been constructed to systematically silence acts of injustice committed onto certain parts of the population in South Korea’s process towards democratization and economic development, while simultaneously negotiating the continuous division of North and South and constant US military presence in the country for the past sixty years.
The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger is a film about trying to remember something, which one might not even know about, or speak something, which has been methodologically repressed, but which is embodied in the present where it manifests as residues and effects of collective trauma. In order to account for these gaps in narratives and the emotional effects of trauma and social stigmatization, various non-linear and experimental modes of storytelling is applied in the film.
It is the hope that this film, in privileging a heterogonous, multifaceted narratives and different forms of storytelling, is able to expose the systems of oppression and their political as well as psychological implications, thereby offering alternatives to dominant narratives and forms of understanding.
Jane Jin Kaisen (1980) is a visual artist working in a project-based manner in the mediums of film, performance, and installation around questions concerning political subjectivity and the formation of collective memory from a postcolonial and transnational feminist perspective. She was adopted from Korea to Denmark and received her education from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, The Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York, and The Interdisciplinary Studio Art Program at UCLA in Los Angeles.
She is co-founder of the artist collectives UFOLab (Unidentified Foreign Object laboratory) and Chamber of Public Secrets. She has screened her films, exhibited, and performed at venues such as Incheon Women Artists Biennale, Gana Art Gallery New York, Kyoto Arts Center, Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, FIKE International Film Festival in Portugal, Hong Kong International Short Film & video Festival, 798 Art Zone in Beijing, The National Gallery in Indonesia, 798 Factory in Beijing, The 2nd Deformes Biennale at Gallery Metropolitana in Chile, and the 25th International Asia Pacific Film Festival in Los Angeles.
Guston Sondin-Kung (1982)
Guston Sondin-Kung has been working as a visual artist primarily in experimental film and performance. His artwork focuses on how systems of knowledge are constructed through emerging contested histories. This investigation is derived from a transnational and postcolonial perspective with the aim of generating alternative genealogies.
He has exhibited his work at Nikolaj Kunsthal, CCA Kitakyushu Museum, MOCA Geffen Contemporary, Scandinavia House New York and SolwayJones Gallery Los Angeles. He has also received grants from The J. Paul Getty Museum, Yip Harburg Foundation, The James Irvine Foundation, The Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation and The Ford Foundation.
