Light and Shadow
Jane Jin Kaisen
2011
Mixed media installation consisting of:
Light and Shadow – 22 framed text pieces (70cm x 36 cm)
Leave Early and Come Back at Dusk: Framed photograph (85 cm x 121 cm)
A Textual Basis: The artists’ fallen hair collected over 9 months – mounted onto paper (82 cm x 123 cm)
Dictionary, Vocabulary, Maps: 3 framed text / proto prints (23,5 cm x 72 cm)

Translation: Se Young Oh, Hyun Joo Jun, Soni Indra Kum.

Exhibitions: Århus Art Building, Denmark – Dissident Translations – Solo Exhibition, Oct. 8 2011-Jan. 8 2012.

Light and Shadow is based on Jane Jin Kaisen’s discovery of her grandfather, Bu Yeong Seon’s memoir, “Light and Shadow”, published in 1997 when he was eighty years old. Not reading Korean, Kaisen had the book translated into English in order to understand its content.

The majority of the works in the installation consist of 3 framed text layers: the original writing by Bu Yeong Seon written in Korean, the translation of his memoir into English, and an additional text reflecting upon his writing by Jane Jin Kaisen.
In his text, Bu Yeong Seon emphasizes his lived experience, witnessing the Jeju Women Divers’ Anti-Japanese resistance in his hometown 1932, his involvement in the ideological disputes following Korea’s liberation from Japan, as well as the outbreak of the 4.3 Incident in 1948.
On the other hand, Jane Jin Kaisen writes from a belated perspective about her return to Jeju Island in 2011 as someone who has come to know these aspects of history only recently. Her writing is about witnessing the current ideological disputes around the Jeju Naval Base construction and the traumatic aftereffects of the Jeju 4.3 Incident. In the section about the Jeju Women Divers, Kaisen holds Bu Yeong Seon’s appraisal of the Women Divers’ anti-Japanese resistance against his neo-Confucian patriarchal values, which led to her adoption, by inserting her mother’s silenced story and life as a Jeju woman diver.
The narratives of Bu Yeong Seon and Jane Jin Kaisen thus oscillate between relating closely– and deviating or directly contradicting each other in their writing about originality, affiliation, history, memory, and language.

In addition to the 22 text-based works around “Light and Shadow”, the installation includes 3 supplementary artworks:

“Dictionary, Vocabulary, Maps” – A triptych reflecting on the politics of translation.

“A Textual Basis”, a framed work consisting of the artists’ fallen hair collected over a period of nine months, which was the time it took to complete the other works in the installation.

“Leave Early and Come Back at Dusk”, a staged color photograph of the artist and appropriation of a photograph of a Jeju Woman Diver figuring on the front cover of Bu Yeong Seon’s book “Annals of the Jeju Women Divers’ Anti-Japanese Resistance” from 1995.