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Tao: There is
By Nadine Kam
no fear, only flow
Star-Bulletin
In feng shui there is flow. According to Komelia Hongja Okim, the Koreans have a similar phrase -- poong soo jirii -- for the term referring to human aspiration to live in harmony with nature. It's a concept that one can explain in a few words, yet take a lifetime to master.
At 60, Okim finds herself in a comfortable place, returning to Hawaii as a distinguished artist and lecturer, but only after years of struggling with forces that caused her to believe that she was a failure at 22, when she arrived from Korea."I was struggling with American life. I couldn't speak English well. My father was afraid that I would marry a student because when you marry a student you have to work very hard. When I married a student, he was very mad. I worked as a pineapple packer, and at a restaurant, and my father said, 'I bring you to this country to work in a restaurant?' "
She was fired from several jobs, including one as a soda jerk at a bowling alley, when she couldn't distinguish between the three sizes of cups -- small, medium and large. "I didn't know the difference, I just gave everybody the same size, large. I lasted three, four days."
Okim will give a talk tomorrow at the University of Hawai'i Art Auditorium on "The Tao of Heavy Metal," tracing the history of royal adornment in Korean culture, the work of contemporary metal artists, and her own work as one of those artists.
Okim, in 1982-83 and 1985-86, received Fulbright Senior International Exchange Grants to teach at Hong-Ik University and Wong-Kwang University in Korea. She's traveled and lectured extensively in this country, Europe and Asia, and this summer was invited to teach courses in small-scale sculpture and metal art during the UH Outreach College's Summer Session.In Okim's jewelry and sculptures, smooth, whimsical figures are often poised within ethereal forests of copper and brass. Pieces on view at the UH Commons Gallery are priced from $400 to $8,000. Each exudes a sense of exuberance on par with Okim's joie de vivre, which comes from having learned to laugh at those things beyond her control.
"I'm glad I'm older, I'm glad I suffered," she says of the journey that led from textiles studies in Korea and the University of Hawai'i to her home in Rockville, Md., where she is a senior professor of jewelry design and metal-smithing at the Montgomery College Department of Art.
In 1965, one semester shy of her B.A. in art from UH, she followed her husband to Indiana University-Bloomington where she faced the dilemma of repeating three years of undergraduate work when her credits were not allowed to be transferred.
To further her difficulties, she was pregnant with her only son, and found herself juggling many new roles. "I always thought I could be the perfect student, perfect wife, perfect mother. This was instilled by my high school principal. I went to a very conservative school where they taught the very good woman must be good in everything. And I just couldn't do it."
At Indiana, she was lured by the metal department down the hall from the textiles department. "I was very excited about the idea of creating large sculptures because being a kind of short (at 5 feet tall) Asian woman, I feel I'm so powerful to be doing these things, and I feel I can do everything."
Her metals professor Alma Eikerman, a founding member of Indiana University's art metal program, saw promise in Okim and asked her to consider switching majors. Okim elected to study both metal and textiles, hoping to eventually merge the two.
Metal was an unlikely medium for her. For one thing, the forging of metals requires heat; Okim was afraid of lighting matches.
"In Korea, they say if you play with matches you will wet the bed," she said. "I hate machines, too. I felt so stupid all the time, but now I find many students are afraid of striking a match and I'm able to tell them they're going to feel scared of techniques, but they can overcome their fears. Like life, if you keep practicing it becomes perfect.
"Whatever you enjoy most, you should accentuate that. And it may help to change majors many times."
Which brings her back to the idea of poong soo jirii, which might also translate to being in the right place at the right time in the universe.
"This country is great because it allows you to be yourself," Okim said. "You can change your major any time. You can move to a different state tomorrow. You can think free, decide free, choose to do whatever you want, go wherever you want."
Years after leaving Korea, she still feels constrained by limitations set by having been raised in such a strict, homogenous society.
"A lot of people think I'm spontaneous, avant-garde, far-out, but I still have the culture I was raised in, so I'm very traditional at the same time.
"My ambition was to combine my interests in fiber and metals. I tried for eight years, but because of my Korean upbringing, I was not flexible enough to come up with the techniques to combine the two.
"I did try to encourage my students, and some have been successful, but for myself, they always seemed to be two separate mediums."
There is no glimmer of inadequacy when Okim says, "I figure, better to dig just one hole instead of too many holes."
The Tao of Heavy Metal
What: Talk featuring Komelia Hongja Okim
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