Valerie Yong Ock Kim Turns Eight Years of Caregiving into 'Only the Bones'

Valerie Yong Ock Kim's new book, Only the Bones, published by Datz Press, records eight years the artist spent caring for her husband, who lived with Alzheimer's disease until his death in 2016. The volume opens with a poem by photographer Duane Michals, dedicated to the couple's story, and unfolds through diaries, poems and photographs made at the sea near her home in Hawaii.

The book refuses sentimentality. Instead, it reflects on what remains as we lose someone we love, and on what becomes visible only when we choose to stay within grief rather than turn away. Kim frames grief as something that shifts and transforms. "It transforms to the place where love lives; and courage," she writes.

How does the artist describe her own work?

Kim's statement is direct about method and motive. "I am drawn to the fragile, the interior life, beneath the surface of thinking, while the mind is busy, moving between the lucid and the dreamlike," she says. "My successful images inhabit thresholds—between the seen and unseen, the intimate and elemental."

Water anchors the whole project. The sea that surrounds her life in Hawaii gave her solace during the years of caregiving, and it carries the book's central ideas of transformation, renewal, and the duality of creation and destruction. Her husband's passing in 2016 continues to drive the practice. "In the wake of loss, I approach photography as a form of listening—to what lingers, what is concealed," she says. "Drawing from the mythologies of the Hawaiian Islands, I am listening for what remains."

The takeaway: for Kim, the camera works as an instrument of attention, not record.

What shaped Kim's path to photography?

Kim's background is unusually varied for a photographic artist. Raised by Korean and Okinawan parents, she developed an early practice of what she calls cultural listening, grounded in the daily mythos of the Hawaiian Islands. She earned a Master of Public Health and worked with teenagers in the community and in psychiatric units of Oahu hospitals before turning fully to the arts.

She then spent two decades in film. Kim was writer-director of Waging Peace, a film about Soviet and American children made during the Peace Talks between the US and the USSR. She worked for twenty years as a Location Manager on Los Angeles feature films, including the Pirates of the Caribbean series, building her artistic practice between the demands of powerful creatives and large-scale movie productions.

The takeaway: hospitals, film sets and island mythologies all feed the same discipline of noticing what stays hidden.

Where has her work been shown?

Kim's photographs have appeared in solo and group exhibitions across the United States and Europe. Selected exhibitions include:

• Imagine Water, a two-person exhibit with Wayne Levin at Loi Gallery, Honolulu, HI
• Gallerie XII and Focus Photo LA at Bergamot Station, Los Angeles, CA
• Liminal II, Verum Ultimum Gallery, Portland, Oregon
• Artists of Hawaii, Downtown Art Gallery, Honolulu
• Passing Notes, Conversations from the Hallelujah series, Crafton Hills College, Yucaipa, CA
• ReGENERATE! Book Arts, Donkey Mill Art Center, Holualoa, HI
• Light, Speed, Matter, A Still Place Waiting, Hui No'eau Visual Art Center, Makawao, Maui

Her filmography is listed on IMDB under Valerie Kim, and her work can be seen at valyokim.com.

What did Datz Press bring to the book?

Kim credits the Seoul-based publisher with shaping the final object. She describes Datz Press as "a group of women who handled this very delicate project with a firm hand and with kid gloves." The team, she says, took her material and built from it their own small film, finding their own timing and dramatic line, and fashioning a visual story that went beyond what she had imagined.

She calls the collaboration "a gentle female voyage handling differences with care and joy."

Only the Bones is available through the Datz Press store at store.datzpress.kr, or by contacting the artist through her website. Kim's practice of listening for what lingers shows no sign of closing: her husband's passing, she says, continues to inform the work, and the sea around Hawaii remains the place where that listening happens.