Telegraph Wires Between One Woman's Thirst and Another's Drowning

A teabag becomes a lung. Then another. Then another.

Watch them bloom across the glass— jellyfish trailing what the body sheds in private. This is the garden where the dead grow backwards. Your grandmother lives now in the pause before steeping becomes drowning.

·        

Love is the archaeology of aftermath.

What falls from you in the shower becomes telegraph wire. First one vessel. Then three. Then a whole fleet sailing nowhere.

Amber holds them. Salt performs its small erasures. The stain persists beneath.

·        

What emerges refuses name.

The drawing remembers what the photograph dreamed: not the object but its fever, the way absence grows tentacles when you feed it your own body.

Here is the country that exists only between sips. Citizenship requires you to swallow what someone else has already tasted.

This is the infinite territory— one woman's thirst, another's drowning.

Every border dissolves the moment you try to cross it.

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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Maps to Nowhere