Stone remembers the green fever of vines,
how they wrote promises across its skin
in cursive chlorophyll. Now brittle alphabets
spell only departure. The rock holds
its gray silence like a mother tongue
forgotten, while autumn's amber testimony
settles around what remains: this binding
that outlasts the life that made it.
Okja Kwon (b. 1981) is a Korean-born, transracial adoptee artist
who communicates through intimate illustrative image-making.
In response to one's survivalist attempts to transcend an identity historically rooted in imperialism, global capitalism, and desirability, Kwon draws upon metaphors that take ritualistic form. The enactment of "witnessing" provides a compilation of whispered ideations and fragmented (re)imagined remembrances of in-betweenness, all in an attempt to build an intuitive and otherworldly bridge to transcend blurred relations.
