I am collecting what remains. Each fragment a letter never sent home.

My body is an archive of empire. The hair falls out in fistfuls. I gather each strand like evidence—scan them hundreds of times until they become weather, storm systems mapped across hanji paper thin as grief.

Once, honey belonged to dynasties. Now I smooth beeswax over surfaces that hold what the mouth cannot say.

The haenyeo dive without killing the sea. But the colonizers' boats scraped everything clean—shellfish, children, names. I work with what they left behind.

—

Some wounds make pearls.

The nacre forming around invasion

is also how we survive it.

—

In glass vessels I place what cannot be held any other way: emptied teabags smaller than memory, woven with hair. Archive of the almost-born. The not-yet-mourned.

I am trying to build a country from fragments. Each piece a portal where the abandoned 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 is a wound.

Still water holding the moon.

빈 그릇이 가장 많이 담는다

The empty vessel holds the most