Opening this weekend at Kai Art Center, Tallinn, Island Beyond the Sea is the first solo exhibition in the Baltic States by Danish-Korean artist and filmmaker Jane Jin Kaisen. Comprising seven video works created between 2022 and 2024, the exhibition presents the complete cycle together in Europe for the first time, taking viewers to Jeju Island, off Korea’s southern coast. On Saturday, 17 October at 2 pm, visitors are invited to a special exhibition tour with the artist, during which Jane Jin Kaisen will share insights into her artistic practice and the making of her evocative films. The exhibition is curated by Karin Laansoo. Island Beyond the Sea is on view at Kai Art Center from 17 October 2026 to 21 February 2027.
Kai Art Center presents Island Beyond the Sea, a solo exhibition by Danish-Korean artist and filmmaker Jane Jin Kaisen. It brings together seven video works made between 2022 and 2024: Burial of This Order (2022), Offering (2023), Halmang (2023), Guardians (2024), Portal (2024), Core (2024) and Wreckage (2024). This marks the first time the complete film cycle will be presented together in Europe, as well as the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in the Baltic States. The cycle takes Jeju, the volcanic island off Korea’s southern coast where the artist was born, as the site of an inquiry into memory, migration and the narration of history.
What distinguishes Kaisen’s practice is that she does not illustrate history; she performs with it. Working over many years with shamans, divers and island communities, she treats filmmaking as a form of ritual. Like Jeju’s shamanic tradition, her films hold past and present, the living and the dead, in continuous relation.
The cycle moves freely between the intimate and the cosmic, from the weathered hands of an elderly diver to the creation of the world. Kaisen draws on Jeju’s mythology to place women at the centre as keepers of knowledge. Among them are Seolmundae Halmang, the grandmother goddess whose body became the island, and the princess Bari, whom Kaisen reads not as a dutiful daughter but as a figure who crosses every border set for her. This lineage is also the artist’s own: her mother and grandmother dived Jeju’s waters alongside the haenyeo, the island’s women free divers. Their knowledge of the sea runs through the films, as does sochang, a long white cotton cloth from Korean rites of passage, spiralled across black lava, carried underwater and unfurled as a cord tying one generation to the next.
The island’s twentieth-century history, including the state violence of 1947–1954, is present in the work but never its endpoint. Kaisen’s question is less what was lost than how life returns: how memory is passed on, how relations are remade, how to begin again. Projected at architectural scale, the films are installed to be moved through rather than faced. Looking becomes a form of acknowledgement, what Kaisen calls ‘translating otherwise’, through which silenced histories can be recognised anew.
‘Tallinn, like Jeju, is a city shaped by the sea, and by people who have carried their stories across generations and found new ways to tell them. Jane Jin Kaisen’s films open a conversation between our two shores: about how memory is passed on and how communities renew themselves. Kaisen gives voice to women’s knowledge and to the island’s myths, and offers a way of looking that is attentive, generous and hopeful,’ Karin Laansoo, Artistic Director, Kai Art Center.
About the artist
Jane Jin Kaisen (b. 1980, South Korea; based in Denmark) is known for visually striking works that are layered, performative and poetic. Holding past and present side by side, her work traces how memory, migration, borders and translation shape individual lives, and how personal experience is bound up with the histories of nations. Kaisen represented Korea at the 58th Venice Biennale, and her exhibition Community of Parting at Kunsthal Charlottenborg was named Exhibition of the Year 2020 by AICA Denmark. Recent presentations include the Medina Triennial (2026), the 13th Berlin Biennale, the 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale, the 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts and the Hawaiʻi Triennial (all 2025), the Korea Artist Prize 2024 at MMCA Korea, and Dislocation Blues at Tate Modern (2023). She holds a PhD from the University of Copenhagen and an MFA from UCLA, and is an alumna of the Whitney Independent Study Program.
Jane Jin Kaisen’s first solo exhibition in the Baltic States, Island Beyond the Sea, is on view at Kai Art Center from 17 October 2026 to 21 February 2027. Join us for a special exhibition tour and a conversation with the artist on Saturday, 17 October at 2 pm.
The exhibition is supported by the Korea Foundation, the New Carlsberg Foundation, the Cultural Endowment of Estonia, the Danish Arts Foundation, the City of Tallinn and the SBS Foundation Korea Artist Prize Promotion Fund.