Mindy’s work is focused towards:
Expressive art and embodied practices for collective and interpersonal healing
Relational somatics as a tool for attachment repair
Belonging as inherent interdependence, not individual safety
Korean adoptee and AAPI advocacy
Queer, kink community organizing
Movement cycles of iteration, integration and defragmentation, for collective wholeness
Liminality, mystery, elemental alchemy and energy, from an East Asian animist perspective
Pleasure, play, and radical imagination as regeneration
Mindy Tsonas Choi
Mindy is a maker, manyeo and cultural organizer who facilitates circles of creativity, collective belonging and care.
She believes in using art and alchemy as mediums for generative connection, somatic healing and radical change. As a transracial, transnational adopted person from the South Korean diaspora, this deeply informs her embodied perspective on land and lineage throughout all of her work and organizing.
A Story of Reclaiming Belonging
As a transracial, intercountry adopted person, it has been essential for me to understand the harmful dominant systems that created my separation and otherness, in order to find my truth. Coming out of the adoptee fog has been both a heart-opening and painful journey of rediscovery. In a culture that says I do not belong, my life experiences and intersecting identities have sent me seeking a deeper understanding of how we all seek to belong.
Through years of searching, learning and healing, I’ve come to see how capitalist narratives co-opt and commodify belonging into something separate and external that we as individuals must strive for - which can be lost or gained, bought and sold.
It has also been through my ongoing process of reclaiming my lost Korean heritage, that I have learned about the cultural idea of Jeong (a word we do not have a direct equivalent for in English), which means something akin to a broadly unified and highly regarded collective kinship, care and good will shared amongst all Koreans - an ideology that highlights and challenges the way belonging operates within different cultures, and invites us to consider other possibilities of how we might better belong.
Finding my way back to belonging, with myself, others and the earth, I realize is not a single destination as much as it is a reclamation and reorientation, a lifelong practice, and a wild mystical calling.
Cultural Bio
Along with nearly 200,000 other children to date, I became part of the first wave of international adoptions out of post-war Korea to the US in 1972, at the age of 10 months old. I grew up in a loving, upper middle class, all white family and community just north of Boston. Though I had access to many “opportunities for a better life”, unnamed and unaware, I deeply struggled with the inherent trauma of my adoption, forced assimilation, and resulting racism, for most of my life.
In my early 30's, just after the arrival of my first son and my first trip back to Korea, creativity became the catalyst and portal through which I would finally begin to explore who I was on my own terms. Sharing my art and writing became a practice of being brave with my voice, finding my spirit and medicine, building community, and embodying my truth beyond trauma and oppression.
Creativity saved me, where systems and institutions failed.
My personal healing happened in increments, through multiple facets and identities, over many seasons and decades with the help of countless artists, healers, therapists, facilitators, activists and mentors. Healing and reclamation is always iterative, nuanced and ongoing.
During the summer of 2020, with the full support of my family, I officially began my birth family search. It took me half a lifetime and a global and racial pandemic to finally feel ready to make such a potentially life-changing decision. Later that same year, I changed my name professionally to reflect my Korean identity by reclaiming the surname I was assigned prior to my adoption. I will always hold hope to know my true family name and biological lineage.
For now, I am still searching and reorienting towards wholeness and belonging everyday. I’m actively living the questions and learning to love across wide oceans, both actual and metaphorical.
Location
I live and create on unceeded land of the Agawam, Pennacook, and Pawtucket peoples, and the southern region of the Wabanaki Confederacy, on what is currently known as Massachusetts. As a community-made and collectively supported artist, I grow more humble every day in this human experience as I aim to create and thrive within collapsing systems of racial capitalism and colonial empire.
