The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger

2010 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

72 minutes

Jane Jin Kaisen and Guston Sondin-Kung

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The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger begins with the sound of women’s voices describing histories of violence, of things repressed and silenced. Gradually, their voices accumulate into a cacophony of pure sonic intensity against an extreme slow-motioned image of a woman survivor of Japan’s military sexual slavery who, in the absence of words to accurately account for her suffering, gets up and walks into the center of a war crimes tribunal court room and gestures wildly before she faints. This work by Jane Jin Kasen and Guston Sondin-Kung explores ways in which trauma is passed on from previous generations to the present through a sense of being haunted. Following a group of international adoptees and other women of the Korean diaspora in their 20s and 30s, the film uncovers how the return of the repressed confronts and destabilizes narratives that have been constructed to silence histories of pain and violence inflicted onto the bodies and lives of women and children. A genealogy is created by relating the stories of three generations of women: the former ‘comfort’ women who were subjected to military sexual slavery by the Japanese military between World War I and World War II – women who have worked as sex-workers around US military bases in South Korea since the 1950s to the present – and transnational adopted women from South Korea to the West since the Korean War. Composed of oral testimonies, poetry, public statements and interview fragments, the filmic narrative unfolds in a non-chronologic and layered manner. By reinterpreting and juxtaposing historical archive footage with recorded documentary material and staged performative actions, multiple spaces and times are conjoined to contour how a nexus of militarism, patriarchy, racism and nationalism served to suppress and marginalize certain parts of the population and how this aspect of world history continues to reverberate in the present moment.

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Working with narrative experimental film, multi-channel video installation, performative video art, photography, and text, Jane Jin Kaisen engages themes of memory, trauma, migration and translation at the intersection of personal and collective histories. Her own diasporic story, sent from Jeju island, South Korea to Denmark as an adoptee brought her to think critically about women’s diaspora as a dark shadow of East Asia’s history of modernization. Kaisen’s practice is propelled by a sense of necessity and an aspiration for carving out spaces for critical reflection and dialogue. She creates distinct modes of storytelling through layered narratives and experimental usage of voice, image, sound, and archive material. Her artworks resonate as both critical translations and poetic testimonies, gesturing towards emerging communities and embodied memories that linger ghostly at the margins of the seeable and sayable. While each work is driven by its own aesthetic and discursive commitments, together they form a multi-faceted and in-depth inquiry into transnational and gendered histories related to legacies of colonialism, modernity, war, and borders. Guston Sondin-Kung is an American visual artist that lives in Denmark. His artistic practice is situated primarily in the field of narrative experimental cinema and is oftentimes project-based, with a lengthy research component. Recurring themes in his artwork include notions of embodied performance and multi-directional memory.

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Colors:

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• diaspora.n.03
• colonialism.n.01
• feminist_movement.n.01
• memory.n.01
• trauma.n.02
• militarism.n.01