Hwa Records
photo credit: Matt Odom
Kayla Tange is a Los Angeles based artist and cultural producer who was born in South Korea and adopted by a Japanese American family. Her love for poetry and photography slowly progressed into a conceptual performance practice. Physical and psychic boundaries, sexuality and permanence are also recurring themes. She is the co-producer of Sacred Wounds, an online show focused around ritual, subverting cultural stereotypes and ancestral healing for Asian performers. Tange is also known as “the erotic conceptualist” under the performer name Coco Ono where she expresses racial stereotyping, emotional, physical, and societal confines – often in dark humor. Coupling her experiences, while recalibrating her own sexuality, the work is created to facilitate meaningful dialogue around our need for connection and belonging. Her work has been performed or exhibited at Human Resources, Highways Performance Space, REDCAT, Torrance Art Museum, Performance Studies International, Melbourne, OUTFEST and Asian Pacific Film Festival.
photo credit: Kayla Tange
C. Ryu is an artist and community builder performing history. Born in Lawrence, Kansas to Korean immigrants, Ryu’s lived experiences in Anglo-suburbia as an immigrant child as well as her time in Los Angeles surrounded by joyous Asian diasporic culture, have informed her art practice of searching for radical existence in creating safe spaces that allows her communities to dream wild, process unheard traumas, or create grounds for new futures. Using social practice, workshops, and experimental performance, Ryu creates to imagine alternative education, unravel cultural colonialism, and pose questions on assumed narratives based on the consumption of othered bodies.
Ryu has performed, exhibited, and culturally produced at Carnegie Museum of Art, McDonough Museum of Art, University of Southern California, LA Art Show, and more.
Saewon Oh is a second generation Korean-American artist, healer, energy worker, earth lover and founder of Sun Song, an embodied research lab for plant collaboration, planetary healing and vibrational essence therapy.
Saewon builds a bridge between the human and plant worlds using guided meditation, somatic exploration, potion making, sound and movement. She also teaches workshops, offers 1:1 session work and performs for her personal art and healing practice.
Saewon studied folk herbalism at Berkeley Herbal Center, plant spirit medicine at The Gaia School of Healing and worked at an experimental tea house in Seoul where she lived between 2010-2013. She has taught and/or performed at the Golden Dome School, Hammer Museum, Current LA, The Mortuary, Disjecta Contemporary Art Center, Commonwealth and Council, Tulsa Artist Fellowship, Seraphim Dream, and VPAM Arts.
photo credit: Sarah McClean
Roger Kim is a multidisciplinary artist working with music, text, interactive electronics, images, and sculpture. His work explores issues related to the Korean diaspora, including the evolution of traditional practices, the drive to find belonging, and effects of history and intergenerational trauma. He has performed and exhibited at ICA San Jose, Mills College Art Museum, ICA San Francisco, REDCAT, the YBCA New Frequencies Festival, CultureHub LA, Re-Fest, and the California Institute of the Arts. He has received grants and awards from UC Berkeley, CultureHub LA, ICA San Francisco, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, and the California Institute of the Arts.
Roger earned a BA in music at UC Berkeley under Myra Melford and an MFA in music performance and composition from the California Institute of the Arts under Eyvind Kang, and has studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Roger studied traditional Korean music in South Korea with Ji Soonja, Scarlett Choi, Kim Dongwon, Moon Soohyeon, and Yeon Jeho. Roger publishes puri zine about Korean history, is the leader of Kkiri Kkiri Samulnori, and facilitates workshops exploring Korean diasporic rage as part of Hwa Records artist collective.