For a while now, Kiwon Wang has been going to weekly poetry readings near her studio in New York’s Chelsea arts district. This, she’ll tell you, is a bit of a departure for her. 

“Poetry is something I’m not comfortable with – although I like to read – because English is not my native tongue,” admits the Korean-born jeweler. “To understand or write poetry, you really have to have a deeper understanding of the language. But I’ve started to get into it.”

Ironically, talking with Wang, you get the sense of someone who uses words in uncommonly precise and colorful ways – like a poet. In conversation she’ll often repeat a word for emphasis: She favors artful, Comme des Garçons-style clothing in an unwavering palette of “black, black, and black. And black.” At times she’s lyrical, as when she explains her love for the paradoxical quality of pearls: “The pearl is created from the oyster’s suffering, yet it has the most beautiful iridescent shine, due to the suffering.” And she conveys a world of meaning in a spare, elegant turn of phrase, describing the freedom she felt after coming to America as a young art student some 30 years ago: “I realized I am the designer of my own life.” 

Wang’s jewelry, likewise, has that eloquent, ultra-refined essence of poetry. Her necklaces, brooches, rings, tiaras, and other adornments are small sculptures, really, conceptual works of art composed with great care, translated by hand into deeply felt statements. Oh, and they look wonderful when you wear them, too.

“For every piece, every material that I choose, there is a reason that fulfills my desire, what I want to express. I try to be very true. I want my pieces to be like an autobiography. I look at them and still remember vividly what I experienced, what I felt, when I made them,” Wang says. “Writers write with a computer or a pen. I write with my jewelry.” 

“East meets West” is her story, the theme she has explored for two decades now. On one level, it’s explicitly about her experience navigating two cultures. It also appears symbolically, as “foreign materials mixed together to become new form.” Paper and metal, pearls and Ping-Pong balls, the precious and the reclaimed – at once contrasting and in harmony, they become, in Wang’s hands, objects of transcendent beauty, as well as think pieces.

Paper, literature, and the printed word have been recurrent motifs for Wang. In one necklace, she’ll combine a fragment of writing by philosopher Michel Foucault, scraps from a newspaper stock market page, and a single baroque pearl to depict various dimensions of richness – riches that are more metaphysical than monetary. Since attending those poetry readings, she’s done a series dedicated to the poet’s art. She’ll collage a spherical form with a piece of a page from a 150-year-old book of Korean poetry, then add metal components covered in gold leaf. 

“Poetry is written words, but to me the feeling is three-dimensional,” she says. “All the words poets use, to me, really are as precious as gold.” 

Wang grew up “surrounded by paper,” in an old house in Seoul built in the traditional Hanok architectural style, with rice paper covering the floors, walls, and doors. Introverted and imaginative, she loved to read, working her way through all the Great Books on her parents’ shelf. She also loved trying on her mother’s jewelry, and was fascinated by the box that held these treasures, “the jeweled container with all the gemstones and jewelry glittering inside, in the dark, waiting for someone to wear them, so they can shine.” Sensitive and romantic herself, Wang’s mother encouraged her artistic impulses. “She said, ‘You have to be able to cry when you see the autumn leaves falling, to go see opera, to enjoy the stage.’ ” 

Her businessman father was more practical and didn’t want her to go to art school; and when push came to shove, her mother wanted her to pursue a career in medicine. Wang was studious, a “good girl,” but restless. When she traveled with her choir to perform at university campuses in the United States, she remembers, “I was so taken by the students’ attitudes. They all looked like they knew what they were doing, like they were in control. They had confidence in their faces and bodies. I thought, maybe if I come to America I’ll have that, too.” 

To please her parents, she earned a degree in biology at a Korean university. After that, she decided it was “my turn” and headed for the United States, enrolling in the jewelry and metalsmithing program at Georgia State University in Atlanta in 1989. There, she and her classmates would chat as they worked at their benches. From them, she learned the finer points of American idiom and pop culture, the nuances of jokes Johnny Carson had told on TV the night before. She went on to graduate school at Rhode Island School of Design, where “it was all about the concept of developing creativity and identity,” she recalls. “In undergraduate school I learned good technique, to speak. At RISD I created my own language, to express.” 

That was when she settled on her East-meets-West theme. To get it right, she re-examined the rich history and culture of her native land – its national treasures, paintings, ceramics, jewelry. “I read and studied with a different eye, because I wanted to know what makes Korea Korea. I wanted to be able to talk about Korea with my own tongue.” To gain a deeper knowledge of her adopted country, she took a six-week road trip from Rhode Island to Oregon to Texas and back. “I experienced everything with my own heart and body,” she says of that inspiring journey. “I understood what people call the American spirit – my own interpretation.” She continued to mine this conceptual vein after moving to New York in 1995 and has done so ever since. 

As personal as her pieces are, it’s important to Wang that they be wearable and engaging. “I like to invite the wearer’s participation,” she says. Sometimes she’ll incorporate parts that can be moved, adjusted, “so that you can interact and communicate with the piece by caressing it, changing the design.” She loves seeing a work take on a whole new persona the moment someone puts it on. 

“The body and jewelry are inseparable. I think the human body is the most beautiful three-dimensional sculpture on Earth. It has always been my idea that jewelry not just sit on top of the body and shine. It needs to create an interesting space around the body.”

She feels gratified to be able to earn a living as an artist, especially in today’s fast-paced world. “That’s something I’ve been thinking about. Everything is digital, everything is now. Now, now, now, available instantly,” she laments. “I’m so happy I chose craft as my occupation, to make things with my hands. Sometimes it takes a while to bear fruit. But in every process, I experience the preciousness of making things painstakingly.” Her message to young makers: Persevere. “Dive into what makes you happy. Don’t get discouraged. The most beautiful things are things made with the hand, with sincerity, with love and passion.”

At 52, Wang finds herself at an interesting stage of life, self-aware but open to the unexpected. “You know, we evolve. We get older and a little wiser, more programmed and less raw. I think my work has gotten like that, too – more mature and less insane,” she says with a laugh. 

That said, she may be entering a new phase. When her father fell ill a few years ago, she made a decision to put her life and work on hold to be there for him, up until his death last winter. Now, emerging from that emotionally intense period, “I feel like a new person, in a way,” she reflects. In terms of a creative direction, she’s feeling downright adventurous, considering more color, more unusual materials.

“I’m thinking my next pieces are going to be very different, really wild.” 

Joyce Lovelace is contributing editor for American Craft.