Biography

Jane Jin Kaisen (born May 28, 1980) is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Kaisen was born in Jeju Island, South Korea and adopted to Denmark in 1980. She is Professor of Media Arts at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. She received her Ph.D. from University of Copenhagen, her MA in Media Art and Art Theory from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio Art from The University of California Los Angeles. She also participated in The Whitney Independent Study Program.Working with video installation, experimental film, photographic installation, performance, and text, Kaisen's artistic practice is informed by extensive interdisciplinary research and engagement with diverse communities. She is known for her visually striking, multilayered, performative, poetic, and multi-voiced feminist works through which past and present are brought into relation. Engaging topics such as memory, migration, borders, and translation, she activates the field where subjective experience and embodied knowledge intersect with larger political histories. Her works negotiate and mediate the means of representation, resistance and reconciliation, thus forming alternative genealogies and sites of collective emergence.She represented Korea at the 58th Venice Biennale with the film installation Community of Parting (2019) alongside artists Hwayeon Nam and siren eun young jeong in the exhibition History Has Failed Us, but No Matter curated by Hyunjin Kim.Her narrative experimental film The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger (2010) made in collaboration with Guston Sondin-Kung explores the gendered effects of war and militarism by tracing a genealogy between three generations of women.In 2011 Jane Jin Kaisen began the multi-channel video installation Reiterations of Dissent for which she was awarded the Montana ENTERPRIZE. The piece has been exhibited widely and in multiple formats, among others at Asia Culture Center (KR), Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art (KR), Aarhus Kunstbygning (DK), Kunsthallen Brandts (DK), Sonoma County Museum (USA), and The Jeju April 3 Peace Park (KR).Jane Jin Kaisen is the co-founder of the artist unit itinerant with Guston Sondin Kung and together they have organized and curated a series of art exhibitions and events. She is also co-founder of the artist groups UFOlab (Unidentified Foreign Object Laboratory) with Anna Jin Hwa Borstam, Charlotte Kim Boed, Jette Hye Jin Mortensen and Trine Meesook Gleerup) as well as the artist group Orientity along with Natsue Haji OH, Kimura byol-nathalie lemoine, Adel KsK, Raymond Hahn, Naomi K. Long. The artist group Orientity has exhibited together in Kyoto Art Center (2004), in Hong Kong at Fringe Club (2005), in Montreal at Galerie La Centrale (2007), in Grenoble at la Maison Internationale (2008), in Lille at Maison Folies (2009) and at Art Space C, Jeju Korea (2021).Jane Jin Kaisen has also curated exhibitions and events. She was a curator of the 10th Open International Performance Art Festival in 2009 in Beijing, China, which included performance artists from many different countries.