Closing Distance (근접)

Written By Ok-ja Kwon

Before the scale tips, two hands weigh each other the way my grandmother weighed rice — not measuring but listening for the grain that would not agree. Dusk loosens its seam in the field. The gleaner enters after the reaper, choosing what the blade refused — the way the haenyeo enters the water: not falling. Choosing. What she lifts she lifts through her own throat.

There is an hour before the body
settles on its element
in which my hands forget which water
they belong to. I have scanned
the photograph two hundred times.
Each pass, the face grows
fainter and more exact —
a language practiced
by no one living. To cross
from the submerged archive
into the ignited body
is to stop dreaming the record
and become the vessel
the record was carried in.

The visible and the veiled
along one spine: what cannot be named
sends its tide anyway.
I weigh a coil of my own hair
against a sheet of hanji
and find them equal. The burnished page
holds its ghost. The ghost
holds its own shore.
I do not know
whether I am being illumined
or dissolved —

only that the fire I was given
has begun, at last,
to remember water.

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
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Empty River of the Mountain