Hwa Records
Upcoming
Connecting History with Family Narrative: Korean Family Stories and Ancestral Meditation Workshop
Location: Online
Time: 6-8pm EDT
Facilitators: Roger Kim and Saewon Oh
RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/334202186737
In this workshop, participants will get a brief review of Korean history, with a special focus on the political and societal forces that are the sources of trauma in many Korean families, as well as the shame that makes it difficult to share and process these traumas. Participants will be encouraged, but not required, to share their family stories, and will be led in an ancestral timeline healing meditation.
This workshop is being presented as part of I Am Here/You Were There: Archiving Transgenerational Memory Within the Korean Diaspora, an online exhibition that brings together three artists – Jiwon Choi, Jesse Chun, and Kang Seung Lee – whose works navigate the transnational and transgenerational histories of the Korean diaspora
HWA Break Release
Location: Online
Time: 6-8pm EDT
Facilitators: Kayla Tange & Caroline Yoo
RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/hwa-records-hwa-break-release-tickets-334801930587
In HWA Break Release, this workshop will explore the sounds in our bodies that we repress. What are the fire, rage, shameful, vulnerable and or uncomfortable moments that we have swallowed and allowed to be complacent in our beings? Part of the workshop will be opening up the group for a shared listening space where participants can but are not required to share their own stories of HWA and their pent up emotions. Then using performative exercises based in breathwork, movement, and experimental sounds, this workshop will be a space to allow all the sounds weird, afraid, and overwhelming to come to the surface, allowing us to begin to find our own methodologies to release the HWA (fire, rage, pent up emotion, flower) in us.
This workshop is being presented as part of I Am Here/You Were There: Archiving Transgenerational Memory Within the Korean Diaspora, an online exhibition that brings together three artists – Jiwon Choi, Jesse Chun, and Kang Seung Lee – whose works navigate the transnational and transgenerational histories of the Korean diaspora
Past
HWA Performance at Leymusoom SarangBang Grand Opening
Location: 41 Ross, San Francisco
Time: 5-8pm
The Chinese Culture Center and 41 Ross Artist-in-Residence Heesoo Kwon welcome you to Leymusoom Sarang-bang Grand Opening!
This event’s namesake “Sarangbang” (사랑방, 舍廊房) references a study and leisure room located in Korean traditional houses that were designated only for men. However, when you take the Korean word apart, ‘sarang’ means love, and ‘bang’ means room. For the artist, the ‘Room of Love” emerges as a conceptual space for prospering feminism and queer fluidity through leisure and communal activities. On Friday, April 15, join us at the “Sarangbang" to explore a digital shrine of Chinatown small businesses, play time-travel ping pong, hang out by the shrimp BBQ, and be a part of the Leymusoom universe!
HWA Somatic Release Workshop
Location: ICA San Francisco
Time: 11:30-1:30pm
Facilitators: Saewon Oh & Caroline Yoo
In this workshop designed for members of the Korean diaspora, we will create a safe space for sharing and exploring the root causes of our HWA aka our repressed ancestral fire. After a discussion of what Hwa is and how it can manifest in the body, we will engage in a group cathartic release using healing tools such as movement, dance, vocalization and flower essences* for emotional release. Participants will have a chance to share their experiences with other members of the Korean diaspora and be witnessed in their emotional processing.
*Flower essences are vibrational plant medicines, taken in microdoses and used as therapeutic remedies for emotional and energetic healing.
Location: ICA San Francisco
Time: 8pm
Performers: Roger Kim, Saewon Oh, Kayla Tange, & Caroline Yoo
The Hwa Records team will be exhibiting a performance based around transforming hwa in the Korean community featuring hybrid traditional/modernized Korean objects, instruments, and costumes. Hwa, loosely translated, refers to fire, rage, and pent-up emotion.
Through voice, movement, sound, and projection, Hwa Records will create an immersive experimental performance exploring how historical record, memory, and lived experience may not always align with the complexities of migration, culture induced shame, and ancestral lineage. By searching for our own paths of becoming we embody our defiant definitions of what “Korean” and “American” means. Hwa Records invites the audience to witness the rebirth, the transmutation of our HWA.
**The diaspora object Gayageum that will be played during the performance was made by Andrew Sungtaek Ingersoll and Roger Kim
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HWA Family Stories + History Workshop
Location: ICA San Francisco
Time: 10-12pm
Facilitators: Roger Kim & Kayla Tange
In this workshop, participants will get a brief review of Korean history, with a special focus on the political and societal forces that are the sources of trauma in many Korean families, as well as the shame that makes it difficult to share and process these traumas. Participants will be encouraged, but not required, to share their family stories, and will be led by Kayla Tange in a group writing practice that will culminate in a collective poem read aloud together to close the session out.
Dancing Away the Patriarchy in your Family
Location: Online
Facilitator: Caroline Yoo
This is a gathering for femmes and women of the Korean diaspora in the United States who are interested in learning to unabashedly release themselves from the bounds of Korean patriarchy through movement.
Loosely inspired by Talchum (Korean traditional masked dance), participants will come together to create our masks from paper to signify how we have responded to the patriarchy up until then. With our masks, we will create space to channel our yin lineage, call to our femme ancestors to bless us, in our own personalized rituals and move/dance away the patriarchy until our masks are no longer needed.
Think rage dancing in your bedroom as no one is watching, meets personalized ritual, meets giving space to move with emotion and love our bodies to let go of pent up feelings of femme repression. How do we learn to let go of our Hwa rather than bottling it up and carrying it in our blood and bones?
Hwa Family Stories and Korean History
Location: Online
Facilitator: Roger Kim
This workshop is for members of the Korean diaspora to connect the effects of Korean history on their own lives, and the lives of their families. Knowledge of Korean history, or your family's history is not required to participate.
The workshop will begin with a short presentation before opening up for dialogue.
Meeting our Hwa with Poisonous Plants
Location: Online
Facilitator: Saewon Oh
A meditation on the medicine of poison. Using guided meditation, somatic exercises and a safe, micro-dose blend of poisonous flower essences, we will feel, sing, tone and speak into the body to honor our Hwa and clear our energy bodies of all that has been catalyzed and is ready for release.
We will provide all the participants with Saewon's flower essence for free but will need time to mail out the essence so that everyone can join the workshop with the essence in hand.
This workshop will be 90 minutes long.
Hwa Break Release
Location: Online
Facilitators: Kayla Tange and Caroline Yoo
Hwa Break Release is a workshop for those needing to scream their hearts out. This is for those in the Korean diaspora in the USA who are sick of holding back their anger and need a safe place to collectively rage.
We are taught to not take up space and to hold our anger as much as possible. Learning to decolonize and embody our Hwa to see ourselves for the resilient beings we are, is a lifelong process that deserves time, respect and care.
Through collective screaming (we can’t wait to scream with you), collective drawing our Hwa (fire) that we have repressed and gathered over our lives, and performance breathwork, Kayla and Caroline will lead the group to find our voices of Hwa.