Hwa Records: Eternity Horizon
Eternity Horizon collaborates with cyclical time and the element of water to unravel the deep unknown of ancestral memory and the spectre of what has been buried or lost. Through sound, storytelling, poetry, and movement, fragments of personal and collective histories surface and take form in the present. In this performance by 2025-2026 ICA LA artists in residence Hwa Records, diasporic experience is treated as both material and method, offering a space to acknowledge and process inherited narratives.
Hwa Records is a collective of Korean diasporic artists and healers—Roger Kim, Saewon Oh, C. Ryu, and Kayla Tange—exploring Hwa 화 - which translates and mistranslates to fire, anger, repressed emotions, flower, and vase.
Since 2021, the mission of Hwa Records is to create community space for diasporic Koreans to gather and process stresses from generational displacement through workshops and performances. Developed in response to the lack of cultural frameworks for addressing emotional needs, Hwa Records creates a safe space for participants to process and release ancestral hwa through communal, cathartic, somatic and creative practices. This task is vital to rupturing the cycle of history, to exorcising ghosts, and building a livable future.
Hwa Records has performed at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco, Blue Ribbon Garden at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, and has received funding from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Studio for Creative Inquiry and more.
Roger Kim is an interdisciplinary artist working mainly in performance, printmaking, and interactive media and objects. His work mixes traditional and living practices: robotic and hybrid musical instruments, traditional stone walls, K-pop light sticks, and laundry by the river; as ways to examine and hold the contradictions of intersectional identity, how trauma from colonization continues to affect us in the present day, and what role tradition can play in the modern diaspora. Roger publishes puri zine about Korean history, and is the founder of Kkiri Kkiri Samulnori.
Saewon Oh is an interdisciplinary artist, healing practitioner, educator and founder of Sun Song, an embodied research & ritual lab for plant medicine and vibrational earth essence therapy. Her work incorporates improvisational ritual, sound, performance, medicine making, social practice and de-colonial healing technologies to engage the synergistic web of human, non-human, and ancestral consciousness.
C. Ryu is an interdisciplinary artist using translation as a fracture and rebellion to map forgotten histories, revealing psychological shadows haunting diasporic communities. A modern day myth maker, often conflating documentary and science fiction to showcase the warped nature of emotional time in migration storytelling, Ryu collaborates with complex historical narratives, questioning who is allowed to be recorded in archives. Her practice is rooted in performance, lens-based installations, experimental capture, and social practice—utilizing translation as a glitch to remind how much the past has hidden multiplicity, the strange, or the ugly to fit nation-state desires.
Kayla Tange is a Los Angeles–based artist working across video, sculpture, installation, performance, and poetry. Born in South Korea and adopted into a Japanese American family. Her practice examines how displacement, erotic labor, and medical uncertainty become inscribed on the body. Drawing from her personal archive, Tange uses adoption documents, found materials and performance ephemera to explore how lived experience becomes material. Her practice extends into collaboration; she has founded and co-founded several artist-led collectives centered on experimentation and shared authorship. Through disclosure and audience participation, Tange makes the private public.
