AoA x Hwa Records: Grounding Bodies, Casting Dreams
This summer the Agency of Assets (AoA) Youth Fellows collaborated with ICA LA Artists in Residence, Saewon Oh and C. Ryu, of Hwa Records, to organize an exhibition through a series of workshops exploring performance, social practice, and land-based learning.
Drawing from Hwa Records’ Korean diasporic roots, Grounding Bodies, Casting Dreams features a Dol Top 돌탑 stone tower, made from rocks contributed by the fellows, their communities, and the public, collected from their homes. Traditionally, the building of a Dol Top is part of a folk practice used to spiritually safeguard the village. This community-made Dol Top serves as a protective guardian for the AoA youth fellows, their dreams, and wishes for the future.
The exhibition also includes a zine, sound piece, and video inspired by the fellows’ meditations with nature and the elements.
Agency of Assets 2026 Youth Fellows: Aideh Garcia, Aimee Rios, Angel Huerta, Arumi Luna, Clementine Adams, Cynthia Flores, Dylan Sardy, Izzy Lichstein, Kaielyn Saucer, Kannon Kuo, Kaylen Becker, Michel Mendez, Oscar Marquez, and Soren Adair.
Agency of Assets (AoA) is a fellowship program that introduces local youth to leadership through sustained mentorship, hands-on experience, and employment opportunities in the arts. It provides workshops, excursions, forums for dialogue, and paid jobs for high school students from Downtown and East Los Angeles.
Agency of Assets is generously supported by Snap Foundation; The Phillip and Muriel Berman Foundation; and ICA LA’s Fieldwork Council.
Agency of Assets was established in 2016.
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.
Tina Calderon, Thanh Mai K'Taaya, Karin “Lisa” Atkinson, Laura Copelin, The Chapter House, Audrey Medrano, Jessica Fuquay, Regina Lee, Kayla Tange and Roger Kim of Hwa Records, Tongva land, the stone people, plant people, tree, fire, earth, metal, and the waters.