In Flow
Okyoung Noh, Stamps School of Art & Design
Collaborator: Matt Dhillon, LSA
Faculty Advisor: Angela Washko, Professor, Stamps
The exhibition explores the interconnectivity of violence through water, scent, poems, and sound. It features a blood-tinged river projection, a red-water fountain, zines, and ceramics, immersing audiences in the unseen yet persistent flow of historical trauma, memory, and transpacific violence.
The 2-channel video, Flowing Violence: meet me at the water (2024-), will be produced and refined in collaboration with Korean-American poet Kyunghee Kim, and Matt Dhillon, an MFA in Creative Writing. The video features a continuous flow of a river. The seemingly peaceful river carries faint, almost invisible traces of blood and ashes. The camera travels underwater as the voice in the video whispers and recites a poem that Kim and Dhillon co-develop, revealing micro-herstories that were silenced under American imperialist violence in Asia — such as the No Gun Ri Massacre during the Korean War, the Jeju 4.3 massacre, and more. The video will be projected on the long wall in the gallery. A former employee and technician at Duderstadt Center, Tom Bray, will assist me in setting up multichannel videos.
200 copies of the 12-page zines will be installed next to the video, which allows the audience to freely pick up. The zines will include three extensive poems written by Kim and Dhillon, archival images I have collected, and my drawings. This collection of writings and images aims to reflect on American imperialist violence in Asia, with a particular focus on the Korean War and the Jeju 4.3 Massacre. The poem that Kim and I have developed so far only contains the narratives of the Korean War. Dhillon will include a short poem that is inspired by the witness from a Jeju 4.3 survivor, who is my mother-side grandmother, in the final poem, to add more meaningful layers. The zines will be printed on Hanji (Korean traditional) papers, at Small Works Detroit.
Qual Qual (2025) will be installed at the center of the space, a 7.5 ft-long white sculpture that resembles a pond with a water pump. The title is borrowed from the Korean onomatopoeia of massive bleeding or water pouring, which hints at the violence surging into the space. The work holds 200 gallons of dark red water. The water is directly sourced from the Huron River, layered with the scent of blood and gunfire. The surface of the fountain is made out of urethane foam, styrofoam, and stone-textured paint spray, inspired by the porous volcano rocks that were used to build fortresses in Jeju Island in the late 1900s.
A series of mountainous-shaped ceramics, My Grandma’s Suiseki (2025), will be installed on sand-covered wall-mounted shelves. Suiseki is the Japanese art of collecting naturally formed stones that often resemble landscapes. I will hand-build Suiseki-inspired rocks based on those my maternal grandmother collected over decades, reinterpreting this practice as a means of coping with loss and the trauma of violence. The audience is encouraged to press the button on each sculpture, which plays the English voice-over of the witness of several survivors from the Jeju 4.3 Massacre and the Korean War.
We hope to create an immersive and reflective space that invites Ann Arbor locals and campus communities to experience becoming an integral part of the flow, sensing that their bodies and land are intertwined with the flow of violence. By situating In Flow within the local context of Ann Arbor, the project encourages visitors to re-imagine themselves within these transpacific currents of history, urging a deeper engagement with the persistent echoes of past injustices in the present.
Collaborating with two poets of Asian descent, the exhibition will be thoughtfully structured to foster dialogue, remembrance, and healing. This collaborative, poetic, and fragmented writing is key to the installation because it mirrors the elusive, fluid nature of memory, trauma, and history — particularly in relation to violence that is often silenced or erased.