Kwasi Boyd-Bouldin, Artist/Photographer
Kwasi is a multidisciplinary artist whose sensitivity to place and history were largely shaped by his childhood in Los Angeles, and Koreatown in particular. A 2022 Los Angeles Public Library Creator in Residence, he recently dropped two self-published books: Secret Schematic and the third installment of his yearly street photo series, The Public Work.
Above portrait by Helen H. Kim. All artwork below by Kwasi Boyd-Bouldin. This interview has been edited for length, flow, and clarity.
Helen: How did your fascination with documenting places develop?
Kwasi: Well, I lived in a couple of different places as a kid, so neighborhoods always had a fascination for me. Like, how I would move to a new neighborhood and it would start becoming really familiar to me. Also, skateboarding was a really big part of my life. Even before skateboarding, I liked riding my bike. I was just one of those kids that was in the street all the time. So I started from riding my bike to getting heavy into skateboarding. Then I got older and got into graffiti. And graffiti became the lens through which I kind of viewed things. But these things were never really separate from each other. They all have a real connection to a geographic location. So that's how my fascination with places got built.
Helen: Speaking of which, can you tell us about your history in K-Town?
Kwasi: So, basically, I moved to Koreatown when I was 10. I lived in the same apartment until the time I was 23, and then I got my own place right off of Olympic and Western, where I lived until I was in my early 30s.
Jimmy: Do you know why your mom decided to move to Koreatown?
Kwasi: It was a better neighborhood than where we were living. And rent was cheap. For a really long time. That was not only with Koreatown but also the Central Hollywood area.
Helen: So what do you think kept you in Koreatown?
Kwasi: I just didn't leave, you know what I mean? The main thing that kept me in Koreatown for so long was the rent when I moved out into my own place. That apartment was $550 a month and it was rent-controlled. The rent was starting to go up in the area by the time I left but I was still only paying $825. That's how I was able to put myself through school, how I was able to be a photographer and buy film, how I was able to be an artist and afford supplies. I lived in K-Town, worked in Downtown, went to LACC and Cal State LA. And I just always had a camera with me in my daily routine, photographing Koreatown. I was burning through roll after roll and just recording everything, you know? The only reason I moved out of K-Town is because I got engaged and we needed a bigger place. We have kids now and, even though rent is still expensive where we live, we have a lot more physical space for them than what we could afford out here. But both sets of grandparents are in Koreatown, so we’re always around.
Jimmy: It sounds like family is pretty key.
Kwasi: Yeah. Like, you can't really replicate or communicate what it was like when we were coming up but we like having the kids around it all.
Helen: There's this thought that there's a lack of history or rootedness here, or that there’s an overall sense of disconnect. But for the people that grew up here and have stayed here, our experience of L.A. is, like, in a weird way, a provincial or small-town way of living. Your mom still lives here and you come over on Sundays. I was talking to my mom on the way here to let her know that I’ll be over for dinner later. Like, I go over to my parents’ for dinner every week, you know? And that actually exists in L.A. and in Koreatown.
Kwasi: I was born in New York. I moved here when I was two. L.A. wasn’t aspirational for me, and it wasn’t exceptional. It just was what it was. I bump into people I went to elementary school with, working at a store that they’ve been working at forever. You get a chance to see people living their lives in L.A. in a way that mainstream media doesn't see. But, I mean, this is very much the case for K-Town. It's very much the case for, you know, Boyle Heights or South L.A.
Helen: What do you think distinguishes Koreatown as a neighborhood within the context of L.A.?
Kwasi: Well, I mean, I think that K-Town is really different now to when I was younger. There’s a lot of hype now. It’s kind of weird.
Helen: I know, right?
Kwasi: When I was younger, “Koreatown” was the label because businesses were Korean. I had a few neighbors who were Korean but I had more Korean neighbors when I lived in Hollywood and, really, my neighbors were from all over the world. So the name wasn’t a mislabeling but it also wasn’t the whole story. Like, if you lived in K-Town, you knew what that name meant, and it didn’t necessarily mean that the people were Korean. And, there was this sense of community. There was gang activity and all that sort of thing but it wasn’t as epic as it was in some other parts of the city.
And when I say “community,” skateboarding was huge in this area. You go back to all the skating videos from the 90s and they're all filmed on Wilshire. So being a latchkey kid and being able to skate on Wilshire—that’s what all the neighborhood kids did, hanging out and skating. A lot of the communities in Koreatown—not all of them, but a lot of them—were really racially mixed. You pretty much only saw that in K-Town and parts of Hollywood, a little bit on the Westside. So that intersection, that free flow of different types of people, was kind of unique to the area.
Helen: Being that you were a latchkey kid, what were your go-to afterschool snacks?
Kwasi: Oh, there's a lot. I used to really like… What are they called? Ho Hos? No, Zingers! And this candy that’s kinda like SweeTarts, but in a long pack. Kinda chalky and in, like, thin discs…
Helen: I know what you’re talking about. Necco. Necco Wafers.
Kwasi: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Also, my friends in elementary school introduced me to Tamarindo (Mexican tamarind candy). That, and the corn with the mayonnaise. And I used to like random things from the neighborhood ice cream trucks. Different trucks that frequented different neighborhoods had different snacks. I used to go to a private school for a few years called Our Savior right off of 6th and Wilton, and it was really reflective of the changing demographics in the area because it was literally half Black and half Korean, with couple Filipino and couple Latino kids. So at that school, the ice cream truck that used to come around there had more Asian snacks. That's where I used to get Thai iced tea when I was like five.
Helen: Wait, you were having Thai iced tea when you were five?
Kwasi: Yeah, caffeine doesn't bother me. I can have coffee and literally go to sleep right after.
Helen: You were a very sophisticated five-year-old! You’re all, “Ice cream? Forget that, I’ll have the tea.”
Kwasi: Yeah, you know, I was a fancy kid.
Helen: Feel free to reshape this question however it fits with your experience, but I'm curious to know how your identity as an African American man intersects with or was shaped by Koreatown.
Kwasi: That's just who I was in this place. But, I mean, I did live in K-Town during the L.A. Riots and that was intense because I was young.
Jimmy: Oh, right. You here when the riots were taking place.
Kwasi: Yeah, I was here. So there was like a hardening of racial lines in a lot of ways for a while. But, honestly, l was in junior high school and there wasn’t Twitter or the internet, so a lot of how things were wasn't necessarily in my face. In general, there weren't a lot of Black people in Koreatown but, like I said, it was so racially diverse—the crews and everyone. It wasn't utopia, but it was fine, you know what I mean? I don’t think I came across anything particularly harsh—or particularly good—because I was Black in Koreatown. So I guess in that way it was pretty much the same as it was if you were anything else in Koreatown. After the Riots, when I told people, “I live in Koreatown,” they were like, “Wow, that's weird,” because of the tension between Blacks and Koreans in the city as a whole.
Helen: How old were you when the riots happened?
Kwasi: Let me see... It was ’92, so I think I was 13. I was going to Bancroft Middle School in Hollywood at the time. I was the magnet kid that normally took the school bus home. But there were no school buses because there was an uprising. So I had to walk home. I don't know if you all remember but it broke out south of us and the news was like, “It’s moving north.” What was crazy is that the way the media reported on that time and the way it was on the ground were actually really different. They were saying that Black people were coming up north into K-town as a mob. But that's not really what happened. It was more that people in general were really upset. And the media couldn’t recognize that, much less understand it.
So the day after it all started, my mom still had to go to work. And I went to school. And we had to walk home, me and my buddy Jaime. Bancroft is off Santa Monica and Highland so we just took Santa Monica all the way to Western. And the big Sears was on fire. The corner of Santa Monica and Western was on fire.
Helen: So you’re seeing this as you’re walking?
Kwasi: Yeah, we literally walked by the place and it was on fire. Like, people were running out of the building. It was crazy. I was a latchkey kid because it was the ‘90s. So my mom wasn't going to be home for a minute. I stayed at Jaime’s house for about an hour and then I walked home. I took Western down to Oakwood, and then Oakwood to Normandie, and then Normandie down. And right at Normandie and Beverly, there used to be a Chief Auto Parts and a 7-Eleven and a Chinatown Express and a liquor store. And the owners of that liquor store were on the roof with shotguns and I was 13 and I was like [whistles]. Later, I read the stories and stuff about how it was at California Market and down the street but I didn't walk past that so I didn't see it. But it was, like, cracking on literally every corner.
Helen: Did you have conversations about any of this with your mom?
Kwasi: No, not really. Even though my mom's clearly American, she’s not from L.A. So although there wasn’t a barrier with language or anything like that, I was the person that was experiencing things and then explaining it all to her, you know? Her perspective was informed by what was on the news and my perspective was more informed by being—
Helen: Literally on the streets. Wow. So with all that happening with the Riots or the Uprising, did it shift how you perceived Koreatown or L.A. in general? Did you feel a shift in how you yourself were perceived?
Kwasi: I mean, I felt a shift, but the shift had a lot more to do with me growing up and starting to be perceived not as a Black kid but as a Black male. So it wasn’t necessarily because of 1992 and the Uprising. People start looking at you a certain way, you know what I mean? Living in Koreatown wasn’t always dope. Racism was always there. But I wouldn't describe my whole childhood through that and I wouldn’t say that tainted how I experienced Koreatown. I always want to stress that.
Helen: I totally get that. So, a few moments ago, you mentioned there weren’t a lot of Black people in Koreatown. Did you have a longing for that aspect of community?
Kwasi: Yeah. That's why I sought it out. But it's L.A., so my culture was there. I wasn’t removed from it because I lived in Koreatown. I know it's hard for some people who don't have that connection, but my mom was who she was—very Southern—and I had four older siblings who were also around, so I was always surrounded from that perspective.
Helen: So now as an artist, husband, and father, what do you think of present-day Koreatown?
Kwasi: I mean, I like that there is some cultural weight to it outside of L.A. I read something about how some chef—I think he was Korean chef—he was saying how there are more high-end Korean restaurants in Koreatown than there are in the part of Korea that he's from. It's kind of cool for the area to have that level of development and that kind of reputation but I also feel like some of it is a projection, like with the rest of L.A. A lot of K-Town is unaffected by this stuff. It's got all the same problems, and a lot of things have gotten a lot worse. The main thing is that the rent is just too high. Koreatown used to be a place where the rent increase wasn't as big of a thing as it was in other places like Hollywood or Downtown. But it’s just like the rest of L.A. now. I feel like it's lost a little bit of what made it dope to me growing up. Which was that, because it was an affordable place to live, everyone lived here. Like I said, it wasn’t a utopia, but there was a real opportunity to have a cool community.
Like, even when I wasn’t a kid, when I was living off of Olympic and Western. The Starbucks that’s right there at Serrano and Wilshire? I was a 30-year-old dude that had a standing coffee date with this 54-year-old guy named Ted from Eritrea. We’d just sit at the Starbucks and talk about life and stuff. When Korea was hosting the World Cup, we watched the games together on the big screen there. People were losing their minds. Or like when the Lakers were winning championships. Robert Horry made that shot at the last minute and you heard the whole neighborhood scream. Literally, it was like, “Aaahhh!” from all the apartments.
Helen: That’s beautiful.
Kwasi: I feel like moments like that are gone. I think L.A. in general is losing a part of what it is because prices are getting so high.
Helen: We have a lot of affection for L.A., partly because of the nostalgia for what it used to be. But we’re also realists. So considering the reality, what is your hope for the future of Koreatown?
Kwasi: I don't know. I don't think I can have a hope for it. I really wish I did, but there's no way out of the current situation without lowering the rent. There just isn't. I'm fortunate. Like, I've been able to carve out a career for myself and we're not struggling in any way. But everyone needs too many breaks just to live an okay life. They just need too many things to go their way. And if none of that stuff goes your way, you’re fucked. That’s L.A. in general, and I don't necessarily see anyone in any position of power really talking about it like that. Or, even when they are, they're triaging. They're not addressing the fact that, like, you can't get a single for under $1,500. That's insane! What if you have a family? So, you know, my hope would be that that would be fixed. That's my fantasy.
I've been photographing the area so much because I can remember a time before things started to slide. And then, right when I thought it wasn't going to slide anymore, it just accelerated. Even now, I really wish I could be like, “This has to be the bottom, like, it's totally the bottom, right?” But there is no bottom. Without any incentive to fix things, there's not ever going to be a bottom.
Helen: So with this downward trajectory, what keeps you pursuing your documentation of place?
Kwasi: Well, I mean, you have to. I think that if people from here aren’t telling what happened, then no one else could possibly get it right. So documenting is important. And, you know, people are still making their way here. Kids are still laughing and smiling. It’s so easy for me to be like, “Aw, it’s all shit!” But people are still living their lives. And maybe that's where the answer is, where the hope is. You know, I feel like it's important to be present so it’s not just outside people thinking, “Oh, this is a problem,” without the context of what came before, why it is the way that it is. L.A. is an interesting place. Everyone gets it wrong. I'm just too invested in L.A. to not interpret it constantly. We're not going to raise our kids anywhere else so I may as well try to do something where I’m at. My art has given me a way to talk about things. Not as an authority but with a sense of investment.
Jimmy: When you come to Koreatown with your family, with your daughters, what do you show them?
Kwasi: My daughters are still so young. So we're either hanging out at my in-laws house or we're hanging out at my mom's house. But with either one of them, we'll go for walk in the neighborhood or go to Paris Baguette. We never want them to not feel comfortable in K-Town or in L.A. in general.
Jimmy: I do wonder how y'all as parents present your respective cultures to your daughters, because that has to include a number of things. Language, food, music… The list goes on.
Kwasi: One of the things I try to tell my daughters—and I show them how dope and vast the world is—is that they have a grandmother from Taipei and one from Savannah, and that’s them. We present both but we don't really point out, “Oh, this is this,” or, “That is that.” We just present it as a whole. Whatever your culture might be and wherever you might be from, if you pour as much as you can into your kids, into who they are, when the world inevitably starts throwing those darts at them, it doesn't work because they already have their foundation. That's pretty much our approach.
Jimmy: I mean, I think of something as simple as what you had said in terms of snacks.
Kwasi: Right. It’s all pretty organic. My wife grew up with a lot of snacks that I didn't grow up with. Just by default, my daughters will often have rice and seaweed for breakfast. Because that's their mom, you know? These influences percolate into different places and, for them, there's nothing exceptional about it.
Helen: Just like L.A. wasn't exceptional for you.
Kwasi: There’s nothing exceptional about it. From eating soul food to Taiwanese food to McDonald's or whatever. It’s not an experience that other people have in the same way but, for us, it’s just the most natural experience.
Jimmy: That’s badass.
