Mother-of-Pearl

Feb 1

Written By Ok-ja Kwon

What I know of absence I learned from these shells—

the body, once gone, leaves its most honest architecture.

Mother-of-pearl throat singing without breath.

Each curve: a year the ocean counted in salt.

The soft flesh, swallowed in one slick gulp—

forgotten.

While the house it built gleams like captured moonlight

on a white plate.

Jeong.

Three thousand miles.

Your laughter—an echo in the shell of my ear.

The oyster's last gift: the shape of what we've lost.

Han.

The wound that becomes its own strange comfort.

Here, in my palm— even emptiness holds light.

Ok-ja Kwon

Ok-ja 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