Okja Kwon (b. 1981, Seoul, Korea) is a Korean-born transnational adoptee artist based in Milwaukee, WI. They hold an MS in the Cultural Foundations of Education (2012) and a BFA in Painting & Drawing (2007), and Narrative Print & Forms (2009).

__________________________________

I am collecting the sea's broken teeth. Each oyster shell, a letter never sent home. In my hands, they become what my body already knows—that some wounds make pearls, that the nacre forming around invasion is also how we survive it.

I am over 85% Chinese and Japanese sealed inside Korean skin, a mathematics of empire written in blood. My hair falls out in fistfuls, autoimmune—the body rejecting itself, or perhaps remembering. I gather each strand like evidence. Scan them hundreds of times until they become a kind of weather, a storm system mapped across hanji paper thin as grief.

Mother, I am asking: What does it mean to seal longing in beeswax? Once, honey belonged to dynasties. Now I smooth it over surfaces that could be skin, that could be maps, that could be the space between your hands letting me go.

The haenyeo dive without killing the sea. But the colonizers' boats scraped everything clean—shellfish, children, names. I collect what remains. In glass orbs, I place emptied teabags, smaller than memory, woven with hair. Here is my archive of the almost-born.

Sometimes I think my art is just another way of saying: I am trying to build a country from fragments. Each piece a portal where the abandoned child meets the oyster's question—how to make a home around what intrudes. How to transform surveillance into sight. How to make the wound beautiful without forgetting it's a wound.