Talon

Talon (she/her) is a queer Korean transracial, transnational adoption survivor and emerging found-poetry analog paper collage artist. At the intersection of identity, ancestry erasure, adoptee sovereignty, and abolition, she employs collage as both resistance and disruption—challenging dominant narratives about adoption. Her practice critically interrogates white saviorism’s role in transnational adoption and positions her work not only as visual collage but as catalyst, attestation, and transformation.

Her ongoing series, Adoption: Held Ransom (begun in October 2024), cuts and reassembles words and phrases from printed materials. This deliberate visual style acknowledges adoptees kidnapped, families deceived, and children sold into predominantly white Western countries. The collages highlight interrelated issues of systemic deception and the uphill struggle against the adoption industrial complex.

Talon’s work often incorporates her own adoption records—documents in which her adopters literally wrote over her image, watermarking their ownership. This tension inspired pieces like Design a Doll, Buy a Child, where cutouts of children’s heads with white doll bodies lie atop fabricated birth and citizenship papers.

Her practice situates adoption within broader cultural and political conversations. With the overturning of Roe v. Wade, adoption has been framed in the U.S. as an alternative to abortion or as an ethical consumer choice, while ignoring its ties to climate disaster, war, and displacement. Talon’s collages foreground the lived consequences: the loss of birth family, language, culture, and ancestral roots; the alienation of growing up in communities that do not resemble us; and the complicated terrain of adoptee consciousness and citizenship.

Her purpose is not to romanticize adoption as the “forever family” narrative suggests, but to provide an adoptee’s perspective that disrupts that myth. She asks audiences to reconsider adoption’s true legacy in the U.S. and beyond, particularly for transracial, transnational adoptees. At its heart, her work demands we ask:

Who actually benefits from adoption?