How to Teach a Wound to Sing

Written By Okja Kwon

What does it mean to be a crack in someone else's foundation? This concrete knows—each scratch a small migration, each stain a severed root. I trace the fractures with my finger and think: we are not statistics but survived storms. Not metaphors but breath made visible. The surface breaks but does not disappear. We Korean adoptees—scattered seeds finding soil in foreign ground. Our multiplicity is not flattening but flowering. Connection doesn't erase the wound. It teaches the wound to sing.

Okja Kwon

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.

https://www.okjakwon.studio
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