January without snow—
only the half-shell you sent,
its throat still tasting
of salt and distance.
In bare branches,
a squirrel's nest empties.
But here: your hair
burnished into permanence,
each strand pressed into paper
like a prayer made visible.
The world empties
of everything but this: your self,
transformed and held.
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.
