BIOGRAPHY
Jane Jin Kaisen is known for her visually striking, multilayered, performative, poetic, and multi-voiced works that bring past and present into relation. Working with video installation, experimental film, photography, installation, and performance, her artistic practice is informed by extensive interdisciplinary research, artistic collaborations, and engagement with various communities.
Born in 1980 to a family in Jeju Island, Korea and transnationally adopted to a family in Denmark, Kaisen has over more than two decades developed a distinctive body of work concerning memory, migration, borders, and translation at the intersection of embodied knowledge and larger social, cultural, and political histories. Since the early 2000s when she became involved in media art, performance, and transnational diasporic networks across Asia, Europe, and North America, she has been invested in tracing alternative genealogies and sites of emergence through the creation of a number of artworks and collective initiatives negotiating issues of transnational adoption, gender, colonial legacies, and the effects of war and division.
Jeju Island is a recurring site in Kaisen’s practice. Several of her longterm projects address the transgenerational memories, traumas, and truth and reconciliation processes surrounding the Jeju April Third Massacre while others concern Jeju’s distinct cosmology and shamanic culture, which she has continuously documented since 2011. Kaisen’s birth mother and grandmother both worked as haenyeo sea divers and the haenyeo practice, spirituality, and labor history is another enduring focus. The natural environment of Jeju also features centrally across many of Kaisen’s works, including Ieodo (Island Beyond the Sea) 2022-2024, a body of seven distinct but interrelated film works that unfold across Jeju’s volcanic terrain, while they invoke the island’s myths and explore the intersection of ritual, performativity, and everyday life. Similarly, in her ongoing project Currents and Faultlines, 2022- filmed across various island spaces in Asia, as well as in recent works that portray elemental forces – such as the ocean current, the tide, volcanic activity, and celestial bodies – she continues to engage with questions around ecology and sustainability, while mediating from the thresholds of aesthetic forms, disiplines, sensibilities, and across times and spaces.
Kaisen represented Korea at the 58th Venice Biennale with the film installation Community of Parting (2019). Her large-scale solo exhibition Community of Parting at Kunsthal Charlottenborg was awarded Exhibition of the Year 2020 by International Association of Art Critics, Denmark. She is the recipient of a 2025 Ole Haslund’s Artist Grant, the 2023 Beckett-Prize, the 2023 New Carlsberg Foundation Artist Grant, and a 3-year work grant from the Danish Arts Foundation in 2022, among others. Recently she participated in the Medina Triennial (2026), the 13th Seoul MediaCity Biennale (2025), the 13th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2025), the 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts (2025), and the Hawaii Triennial (2025). Her works have been shown at venues such as the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea, Art Sonje Center, Seoul Museum of Art, Leeum Museum of Art, Art SpaceC, Jeju April Third Peace Park (KR), SMK - the National Gallery and Fotografisk Center (DK), Tate Modern and esea contemporary (UK), Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Performa, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Brooklyn Rail (USA) Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Hamburger Bahnhof, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (DE), Palais de Tokyo, Le Bicolore (FR), Vienna Secession (AT), MASI Lugano (CH). Upcoming exhibitions include KAI Art Center (2026), Nam June June Paik Art Center (2026), Pinacoteca de São Paulo (2026) and Göteborgs Konsthall (2027).
She was professor of Media Art at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts from 2020-2026 where she also earned her MA. In addition, she holds a PhD in artistic research from University of Copenhagen, an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio from University of California Los Angeles, and she participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program.