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A spine of lilies, stripped past bloom, past grieving—still threading themselves upward through the needle of air. The bells have emptied their milk into the coming season. What remains is the architecture of having once held sound. I keep the dead bouquet because it knows the shape of my standing. by @okjakwon.studio

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4 months ago

I have been sitting with this piece for over a day. Heartbroken over the cycles of war and unable to find language outside of metaphor and verse to articulate my thoughts.

On February 28, 2026, Operation Epic Fury was announced in an 8-minute video on Truth Social at 2:30 AM. That same hour, my body woke in sweat—legs twitching, inflammation still speaking from the night before. The personal and the geopolitical occupied the same sleepless moment. Neither was a metaphor for the other. They were the same hour.

This poem holds what I could not say in prose. For those of us who wake before the news does. For those who carry their country in the breathing.

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#KoreanAdoptee #KoreanWar #DiasporaPoetics #TruthAndReconciliation #OkjaKwonStudio by @okjakwon.studio

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5 months ago

"The hair comes ashore like a confession—syllable by syllable, dark and wet."

Sometimes I think the ocean is just a room where everyone we've lost goes to take off their shoes. Sometimes I think the strand of hair wrapped around the rock is the only letter that ever arrives.

Little ghost, I see you in the biofilm. Little ancestor, building your bridge one cell at a time. You who know that home is not a place but a process, that belonging is what happens when the smallest parts of us refuse to let go.
—from "Biofilm as a Mother Tongue" by @okjakwon.studio

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a year ago

@vashonartistresidency is still pouring into my dreams nearly 2 months later 🌊🦪🫶🏼🌀 taken in Vashon Island by @okjakwon.studio

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a year ago

Today I held the hanji paper to the light and saw myself—
translucent. Permeable.

The tea water moves across its surface like memory, like the Han River
I've never seen but somehow know
flows through my veins. Each stain
a story interrupted. Each mark
a word I cannot pronounce
in the language that should have been
my mother tongue.

The scratches tell of hands that carved and clawed—
perhaps mine, perhaps hers,
the woman whose face I wear
in fragments. Every line intersects
with another, creating maps
to nowhere, to everywhere
but home.

Where is home when your birth certificate
is a fiction? When your name
was chosen by strangers who loved you
enough to erase you?

The salt tears, always
the salt tears, pooling where ancestry
should flow clean. What ritual
could cleanse this particular kind
of grief—the mourning of a life
unlived, a language unlearned,
a country that expelled you
before you could breathe its air?

I trace the stains with my finger and wonder:
Do the ghosts of the never-was
gather in these spaces? The grandmother
who never held me, the lullabies
unsung, the festivals
uncelebrated.

Maybe healing isn't about washing away
but about honoring what remains—
these beautiful disruptions,
these scars that prove I was here,
that something happened,
that love and loss can coexist
in the same breath.

The water dries but the marks remain.
Testimony.
Witness.
Proof of survival. by @okjakwon.studio

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a year ago

The birds came back. Or maybe they never left. Maybe I was the one who disappeared, who learned to forget the songs my first mother hummed before the agency took me across the ocean in a bassinet labeled with someone else's name.

In that hour when night breaks its own neck to become morning, when the sky bleeds light the color of hanbok silk I've only seen in photographs—you hear them. These small-bodied priests of dawn, their throats opening like the Korean words I lost before I learned to miss them.

You left the retreat. You left the walls that held your becoming like the adoption papers that held your new life—thin, legal, insufficient. But here, in the house where you first learned English, where your white mother's voice still echoes asking if you're hungry in the only language you know how to be hungry in—here the same chorus rises.

What does this mean? That home was never the country that gave you away, never the suburb that raised you to be grateful, never even the face in the mirror that looks like no one you've ever called family.

Home is this: the muscle memory of listening. The way your ear bends toward beauty even when beauty arrives wearing the face of a sparrow—unremarkable, small enough to fit in the palm of a woman who might have been your grandmother, who might have sung to birds like these in a language your mouth has forgotten how to shape.

The video camera shakes in your hands. Everything blurs—the fence, the sky, the precise moment when what you've lost meets what you've found. This is how belonging actually looks: not the sharp before and after the social workers promised, but the soft dissolving of what you thought home meant into what you're still learning it could mean.

The birds keep singing in frequencies your body remembers.

Your Korean bones keep listening through American skin.

In this simple act—ear pressed to the world's mouth—you remember: everywhere you've ever been was practice for learning that some songs cross borders without papers, without permission. That wait beyond language.

Even now. Even here. Even you. by @okjakwon.studio

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a year ago

Through drawing, printmaking, and installation, Okja Kwon (@okjakwon.studio) explores identity, memory, and belonging. A Korean-born, transnational adoptee, Okja often uses the oyster as a symbol of how we protect, reshape, and rebuild ourselves around what’s been lost or taken. During their time at Vashon Artist Residency, Okja has been collecting materials and creating prints through transfer methods.

Much of their work is inspired by the haenyeo, the women sea divers of Jeju Island, whose sustainable harvesting practices and deep relationship with the ocean offer powerful lessons about care, resilience, and matriarchal community. Okja brings these ideas into their own practice, using materials like Hanji paper, hair, and honey to explore themes of family, migration, and the complexity of adoption.

Okja holds BFAs in Painting & Drawing and Narrative Print & Forms, and an MS in Cultural Foundations of Education. They’ve shown work in galleries across the U.S. and abroad, and currently teach critical thinking and writing at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.

Image: Courtesy of the Artist
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#vashonartistresidency #artistresidency #artistresidencies #vashon #vashonisland #drawing #painting #printmaking #transracialadoptee #Haenyeo #identity #migration #artaboutidentity #universityofwisconsinmilwaukee #koreanborn #koreanartist #adoption #printtransfer #milwaukeeartist by @okjakwon.studio

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a year ago

2025's theme is glistening ✨ by @okjakwon.studio

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2 years ago

sometimes, staying home to study where the seams meet. because processing the world around you is necessary. and irreplaceable 🐚🪡🪽🌀 by @okjakwon.studio

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2 years ago

daily studies - attempting each day to awaken from the illusion of separateness 💗 by @okjakwon.studio

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2 years ago

when imprints become reflections by @okjakwon.studio

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2 years ago

expansive exploration(s) of near connection(s) 🔮🌱💞 by @okjakwon.studio

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2 years ago