My fingers pressed lilies into rice paper—
each petal a door I cannot enter.
Graphite clouds bloom where memory burns,
watercolor bleeding pink as birth.
I trace your absence in these transfers,
fingertips finding the same swirls
you danced through: vertical pulls
toward heaven or earth, I cannot tell.
What remains translucent holds the most light.
Even ghosts need bodies
to remember touching.
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.
