BIOGRAPHY
Jane Jin Kaisen is a visual artist and filmmaker. She was born in 1980 in Korea and currently lives in Denmark. Since 2020, she has been Professor of the School of Media Arts, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts.
Spanning video installation, narrative experimental film, photographic installation, performance, and text, Kaisen’s artistic practice is informed by extensive interdisciplinary research, creative collaborations, 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 lived experience and embodied knowledge intersect with larger political histories. Another recurring focus revolves around nature and island spaces, cosmologies, re-framings of myths, and engagement with ritual and spiritual practices. Working from the thresholds of mediums and forms, disciplines and sensibilities, her works destabilize linear conceptions of time and hierarchies of knowledge. Negotiating and mediating the means of representation, resistance, and recognition, she is invested in contouring alternative genealogies and sites of collective emergence.
Kaisen received the Beckett-Prize (2023), the New Carlsberg Foundation Artist Grant (2023), and a 3-year work grant from the Danish Arts Foundation (2022). She represented Korea at the 58th Venice Biennale with the film installation Community of Parting (2019) in the exhibition History Has Failed Us, but No Matter curated by Hyunjin Kim. She was awarded “Exhibition of the Year 2020” by AICA - International Association of Art Critics, Denmark for the exhibition Community of Parting at Kunsthal Charlottenborg.
Recent solo exhibitions include Halmang, esea contemporary, Manchester (2024), Burial of this Order, TPW Gallery, Toronto (2024), Reiterations of Dissent at Jeju April Third Peace Park (2023), Braiding and Mending, The Image Centre, Toronto (2023), Of Specters or Returns, Le Bicolore, Paris (2023), Currents, Fotografisk Center, Copenhagen (2023) Parallax Conjunctures, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Michigan (2021), Community of Parting, Art Sonje Center, Seoul (2021) and Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2020). Recent group exhibitions and screenings include Korea Artist Prize 2024, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea; Forms of the Shadow, Vienna Secession (2024); Rhythmic Vibrations, the Gwangju Biennale American Pavilion (2024); After the Sun, Gammel Strand and Buffalo AKG Art Museum (2024); Taiwan International Video Art Exhibition, Honggah Museum (2023); Between Waves, The Brooklyn Rail, New York (2023); Performa 23 (2023); Forest of Being Time, Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2023); Dislocation Blues: Jane Jin Kaisen, Tate Modern (2023); Ceremony (Burial of an Undead World), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2022); Checkpoint: Border view from Korea, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (2022).
Kaisen holds a PhD in artistic research from the University of Copenhagen, Department of Art and Cultural Studies, an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio Art from the University of California Los Angeles, an MA in Art Theory and Media Art from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program.