Magnolia buds and Cicarda, little bird

For the artist, the magnolia bud, the cicada, and the small bird hold a profound and formative memory. One afternoon after school, on her way home, she discovered a dead baby bird lying on the cement ground in front of her apartment entrance. The bird was newly born, its skin soft and bare, its form only beginning to take shape. Curious about where it had fallen from, Hyunah Koh looked around and noticed a fragile nest hanging precariously atop a tall wooden pole, swaying gently in the air. In that suspended moment, the air grew still and heavy with silence.

Since that day, she has continued to draw birds, revisiting that quiet moment through line, gesture, and repetition. Each summer, the final cries of cicadas recall that same vibration of life on the edge of disappearance. For Koh, the cicada’s song is the trembling echo of existence itself, a rhythm that persists until the very last breath.

In Magnolia Buds and Cicadas, she pieces together magnolia petals, fallen leaves, and fragments of bark to form the shape of a small bird. Holding it gently in her hands, she reawakens the memory of that moment. This act becomes both an invocation and a quiet ritual of restoration, an attempt to weave loss into life and to reassemble the broken ecology between human and nature. Within this process, Koh senses again the delicate balance between life and death, sound and silence, and revives the forgotten rhythms that bind them together.