News
There's a specific kind of frustration that comes from living in a place with creative energy, desire, and talent — and watching it stay fragmented.
Orange County (and beyond) has photographers, designers, writers, strategists, makers, directors, and builders of every kind. It has coffee shops and co-working spaces and event venues. It has people who are genuinely talented, ambitious, and trying to figure out how to build something meaningful alongside the demands of real life.
What it doesn't have enough of is the connective tissue that encourages cross-pollination across these pockets. Our urban sprawl and commuter culture, of course, don’t make it easy.
Who's behind this?
Hi, we're Ivan and Emerline — two Korean American siblings who grew up in Riverside, California. Our childhood was equal parts "typically immigrant" and whimsically unusual. Whether we were staying up until 10 p.m. with our mom to assemble her classroom's holiday decorations, or getting our car totaled in the middle of the Jordanian desert while traveling with our dad on one of his excavations, we were always creating or discovering something together.
That upbringing led us both toward non-linear careers:
Ivan works as an photographer and content producer, having worked with brands like Rivian to small businesses. He is the host and community organizer of CreativeMornings Orange County where he brings together the local creative community each month. He loves outdoor adventures and traveling with friends.
Emerline works as a strategist, writer, and brand consultant, working with large companies like Meta and Ray-Ban as well as smaller founders and creative communities. She originally studied journalism and politics with plans to become a lawyer, but a year abroad in Seoul changed everything. She moved to New York and D.C., and has been making things with friends ever since.
The gap we kept seeing
We love Los Angeles and the energy of big cities. And while our lives have taken different shapes — Emerline toward cities, Ivan toward California's outdoors — we've always felt the same pull toward the regions we grew up in. The suburban areas, the inland communities, the parts of Southern California that have creative people but lack the infrastructure and resources to let us collaborate and find each other.
We kept showing up to things. Creative events, networking nights, pop-ups, showcases. And the people were good. The work was good. But most of the events were in LA and building community wasn’t easy. The conversations stayed surface level or the connections evaporated.
On the day-to-day basis, we realized we were looking for a place to practice closer to where we lived — somewhere to sit down with our work, surrounded by other people doing the same, and actually make some progress. Somewhere the person across from us would know our project by name next week. Somewhere showing up consistently mattered more than showing up perfectly.
Orange County's creative scene has plenty of pockets. What it lacks is communities to grow you practice and opportunities to collaborate. A scene is something you attend. A community (or active network) is something you belong to. One is built around consumption and visibility. The other is built around contribution and consistency.
The infrastructure for scenes exists everywhere: event platforms, Instagram announcements, beautiful venues willing to host a one-night showcase. The intention for community is much harder to find. It requires someone to hold the room open week after week, to design for depth over novelty, to care more about the third visit than the first impression.
That's the gap JOY128 is trying to help close.
Why now, and why here.
Orange County has a reputation. Some of it is earned. It has historically been — and in many ways remains — a place where people have had to work harder to feel like they belong. We know that. We've felt it. But we also believe that reputation isn't destiny.
We're based out of Costa Mesa to start — and that's deliberate. The city calls itself the "City of the Arts," and the infrastructure to back that up is real: the Orange County Museum of Art, the Segerstrom Center, and a Westside neighborhood where warehouses have quietly become studios and makerspaces. Working creatives — art directors, designers, photographers, brand strategists — are already concentrated here. It also sits at a useful geographic middle point: close enough to Los Angeles to draw from its energy, and central enough to reach further inland into communities that are even more underserved.
We felt this gap personally. And we believe the creative culture this region is capable of hasn't fully arrived yet.
JOY128 is an attempt to help evolve and improve the connective tissue. We're figuring it out as we go — and we hope you'll come along.
2026.03.01