JANE JIN KAISEN

 IN STORM’S FOLD, 2023

Jane Jin Kaisen & Guston Sondin-Kung

10 diatone photographs, framed. Small series: Ed. 5 + 2 AP: Each 75x100 cm / Large Series: Ed. 5 + 2 AP 180cm x 135cm

Portrayed centrally in the images of the photographic series In Storm’s Fold is sochang, a long white piece of cotton cloth. The cloth has deep spiritual meaning and is used in rites of passage to symbolize the cycle of life and death and human’s connection to the spirit world. At the same time, the material is intimately connected to the vernacular, serving to carry babies and care for the dead. In the photographs, this serpentine cloth is captured in a flicker of a moment during what appears as its surge through the small coastal village of Hado with its distinct lava rock fences and brightly colored tiled roofs.

Like many rural villages in Jeju Island, Hado is simultaneously a carrier of memory and a space marked by rupture and discontinuity. It stands at the crossroads of generational change where customs that have been practiced for centuries are dwindling. Its aging population grew up at the edge of modernity and are among the last generation to have experienced the Jeju Massacre and the Korean war. Many of them built lives relying on the land and sea for sustenance, but this intricate and fragile relation between humans and the surrounding environment is threatened by mass tourism, real estate speculation, and global climate change. In the summer of 2023 when these photographs were taken the region experienced historically high concentrations of rain and flooding. Caught in the storm’s fold in moments of calm between bursts of successive rainstorms, the photographs compel questions of what complex set of customs, social fabrics, lived experience, language and cosmologies are at risk of being lost because of narrow understandings of the future, and what might be salvaged from that process.