Hwa Records

As Asian hate rises in the United States and our communities struggle with the violence towards our bodies and lack of understanding for our emotional needs, Hwa Records strives to create a safe place where members of the Korean-United States diaspora can find methods to release their HWA, unabashedly and creatively through methods such as drawing, collective screaming, meditation sessions, history research, and more.

The Hwa Records project are FREE creative workshops for the Korean diaspora community living in the United States to see, feel, process, and release their own hwa. Hwa Records sessions are exercises that are inspired by Korean folk tradition with a hybrid twist to help find our own Korean-Western voices of hwa.

Hwa Records began when one of our facilitators was diagnosed with 화병 hwa-byung or “fire sickness”. Hwa-byung is defined as a culture-bound syndrome, mostly affecting women, and; a Korean folk syndrome attributed to the suppression of anger where pent up emotions manifest in the body as difficulty eating, sleeping, and breathing. While the diagnosis in South Korea occurs primarily in middle-age to older women suffering under a prevalently patriarchal society, through further research we found that hwa-byung in the United States could also be caused by displacement stresses such as balancing two cultures - in this case Korean and American. 

This gave birth to Hwa Records. Although not all Korean-Americans have hwa-byung, many experience some form of self-suppression and pent-up emotion from our collective experience as an immigrant community, navigating conflicts of culture, racism, and microaggressions in our daily lives. We created these workshops to share our methods of catharsis in hopes to gift another tool to our peoples to help release our hwa.