My practice begins in doubt of the document. The papers that issued me into the world — relinquishment certificate, orphan visa, a Polaroid that arrived before I did — are the first inherited artwork. Forgeries the state christened as truth. Korean adoption is a translation that cannot return to its source, and I have made a studio of that condition. I call it a theology of paper. It is also the inheritance of anyone whose record was written by a hand that was not their own.

I was born at the equinox, in the hour when light is weighed against itself. The body crossed the Pacific before it held a word. The mother tongue did not survive the crossing. Only the hair did, and the hair had already known where it was going.

I gather the body's slow discards — hair, salt, the oil a palm leaves on hanji — and carry them into protocols of return. What was not permitted to grieve settles into the pulp, the wax, the grain. The redacted line becomes the page. I scan a single strand until it softens into weather that refuses to pass. I warm the beeswax across hours and press what cannot be said into the paper's grain. I wait out lunar cycles before committing a mark. Each surface is a second certificate, issued in the body's own hand.

The 族譜 was refused at the border. I bind another — a reliquary for severed lineages: the relinquished, the renamed, the grandmother who stopped speaking, the cut thread finding its way back to the hand that forgot it.

I work beside the haenyeo in my mind. They descend without taking everything, and I have tried to learn from them what to leave.

If you have found your way to this page, you are part of what remains.