Telophase

Feb 17

Written By Ok-ja Kwon

In the archive— soldiers walking the spine of a country dividing itself.

Y-posts rise. Wishbones planted inverse, luck given to the frozen ground.

We last spoke in 1981.

I wake into the question of her waking.

Forty years of mornings I have not witnessed.

Does she still braid her hair left to right?

Between them, the forked prayers stand.

Each post— a mother's clavicle snapped, waiting for sons to pull from either side.

January redraws the fence in ink.

A thousand chances to break toward one another.

A thousand ways to call this distance home.

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