Issue 11: Tape no. 3 | Blind Spot | Alone
Imagine a father, in the morning, painting the secrets of honeybees. | Know, too, there’s pollen riding on the backs of little birds.
Welcome to Khôra, a dynamic online arts space produced in collaboration with Lidia Yuknavitch’s Corporeal Writing. Visit our Archive to read previous issues. Thank you for the enthusiastic response to this magazine over the past year, and a BIG THANK YOU to our subscribers. Your donations help to pay our writers and artists, something that's incredibly important to us as a small magazine. A donation of just $5 a month means so much, and we're grateful.
Issue 11’s Featured Writer Anne Liu Kellor is the author of Heart Radical: A Search for Language, Love, and Belonging. Her memoir was released in September 2021 and was praised by Cheryl Strayed as “insightful, riveting, and beautifully written.” Anne is a Chinese American writer, editor, coach, and teacher based in Seattle. Her essays have appeared in YES! Magazine, Longreads, The Seventh Wave, Witness, New England Review, Fourth Genre, Entropy, The Normal School, Los Angeles Review, Literary Mama, and many more.
Anne’s essay Alone is an inquiry into the meaning of solitude:
“A Chinese restaurant. Seattle, 1979, I am four. I sit in a red booth by the window. Outside the sky is dark. Light drops of rain hit the pavement. My parents and their friend sit across from me, eating, talking, reaching chopsticks, raising bowls, clinking spoons. Waiters rush back and forth to the kitchen. A tank of live fish sits near the door. We ate one of them for dinner.”
Featured Artist Shan Hur’s sculptural interventions disrupt the viewer’s perception of the white cube as an art container, directly implicating the gallery space as an active element in the artwork itself. The ideas, which inform his practice, derive from a careful examination of construction sites and closed shops, fascinated by the moment of transition when a particular space is reconfigured for a new purpose. View Shan Hur’s Tape no. 3 for additional images from this installation.
Shan Hur (b. 1980, Seoul, Korea) lives and works in London and Seoul. Hur holds an M.F.A from Slade School of Fine Art, London, UK (2010) and a B.F.A in Sculpture from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea (2007). His work is in the collection of the British Art Collection and some recent awards include Royal British Society of Sculptors Bursary Award, London U.K. (2013); Oriel Davies Open 2012, Newtown Wales UK; Finalist, The Open West, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, UK; 1st Award, Art Catlin Finalist (2011).
In Issue 11, we’re back with gorgeous new work from our collaborative team of curated writers Carol Fischbach, Ploi Pirapokin, Adam Swanson, and Sabrina Tom, and artists Helen G. Blake, Jen Fuller, Fay Ku, and Soumya Netrabile. Check out the highlights below.
If you love what you’re seeing, please subscribe, share, tweet, retweet, and post, and Khôra will be back next month.
Yours,
Leigh Hopkins
and the Corporeal/Khôra squad
“Imagine a father, in the morning, painting the secrets of honeybees.
Know, too, there’s pollen riding on the backs of little birds.”
—from Mourning by Adam Swanson
Issue 11 Highlights
Book One: The Roots by Sabrina Tom / Artwork by Helen G. Blake
“So Goda said, let there be flowers. And all the trees, in equal parts protest and obeisance, sucked all the air into their heartwood and let out a transcendent exhale.
The flowers that bloomed were radically united, and as one they licked every branch and twig and leaf with their velvet pink tongues, and the trees released a collective moan.
The pleasure was as intense as the flowers were magnificent, and the trees could not have asked for anything more, and Goda saw that this relationship was lacking higher purpose, and felt things could be better.”
Read Book One: The Roots.
Mourning by Adam Swanson / Artwork by Jen Fuller
“To exhume a body, all you must do is breathe yourself out—
perhaps early, in the morning, as the sun wakes
somewhere in a watery desert or at the foothills of a sweet
yellow mountain.
There, there you are. Breathing.”
Read Mourning.
Help the Shoots Grow, Pull Them by Ploi Pirapokin / Artwork by Fay Ku
“She had been dreaming of fluffy white rabbits, grazing vast, lush fields of green. ‘That’s how the Star People come to be among us,’ Sprout had said. ‘Through rabbits.’ She doodled them munching on the edges of our notepaper. Rabbits, with their stumpy forelegs and longer hind legs, climbing the margins of our books. ‘You can tell that they’re not normal rabbits because they glowed,’ Sprout had said, chuckling. ‘Glow in the dark bunnies, how cute, right?’ Sprout would wriggle her thumb through her index and middle finger like a tail, hopping her way down our thighs in class, leaving behind pressed pink imprints…”
Read Help the Shoots Grow, Pull Them.
Blind Spot by Carol Fischbach / Artwork by Soumya Netrabile
“We wondered between us if the fawn had been abandoned. Was she okay? Where was her mama? What should we do? Johann left the room, took the warmth with him, maybe to do some research about baby deer. He seldom told me what he was up to. I had stopped asking…”
Read Blind Spot.
Khôra will be back next month.
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