On Friday 9 September, I co-hosted with Ra Chapman (Korean intercountry adoptee and playwright) an adoptee artist event in Melbourne, Victoria at the Malthouse Theatre. This event followed the performance of Ra’s incredible comedy play, K-Box which is the story of Lucy (a Korean intercountry adoptee) who is a 30+ year old Korean adoptee who brings some humour and hard truths to the dinner table.
I was honoured to be at the reading of Ra’s play last year when she was awarded the 2020 Patrick White Playwrights Award in Sydney for this piece of work.
Following the play, we had some of our talented intercountry adoptee artists present a small 10 minute segment on their artwork.
The next few blogs will bring to you a couple of these adoptee artists in their presentations, followed by some of the artwork we captured for the ZINE, a small magazine showcasing their artwork as a take home memento from our evening.
For me, the highlight of the evening was a reading by a Korean adoptee who is an academic, a writer, and co-host of podcast Adopted Feels, Ryan Gustafsson. Ryan is a writer, researcher, and podcaster. Their most recent publication is ‘Whole Bodies,’ which appears in Liminal’s anthology Against Disappearance: Essays on Memory (Pantera Press, 2022). Ryan is also co-facilitator of the Korean Adoptee Adoption Research Network (KAARN).
Ryan’s presentation was powerful, eloquent, and poignant and presented with such raw honesty, it resonated within my soul as I could relate to so much of what they shared about how we can feel about our first mother.
Have a listen to Ryan’s reading from an excerpt of their writing titled – We met each other with different names.
Resources
You can follow Ryan at:
website: http://www.ryangustafsson.com
IG: @crewneckgreen
Check out our Photo Album of the evening.
Coming Next is Ebony’s presentation from the evening.