Artist Talk: Christine Sun Kim

Christine Sun Kim

Pictured: Christine Sun Kim on left, myself on the right.

Christine Sun Kim is an artist who works in drawings, installation and conceptual pieces that often use sound or ideas of sound from her perspective as a deaf person, as well as ideas related to ASL and deaf culture. This past Thursday, I  attended her talk at the Manetti Shrem Museum in Davis, California.

Her work, as she introduced it, deals with sound, communication, and space in society. A lot of the way she approaches sound in her work deals with how it can be understood without the ears- she listed things like time, things and experiences as being a type of sound. I was perplexed at first, but as she shared her works, her ideas became clear.

One of the pieces she described involved shipping a sound recorder across a large distance- resulting in 24 hours of sound as the package was shipped. She played  a sound clip and signed along with it. The idea seemed to me that the sound was the movement, the actions and the passing time. An interesting thing she made sure to mention was how she made an agreement with the person who was sent the sound that they would not listen to it. It was a way for her to maintain ownership, or power, over the sound and by extension, her art.

Another work dealt with the idea of listening skills beyond using ears. To express this, she created an installation where people had  to walk through holding a wand-like object that connected to a long strip of felt, and by keeping the connection and moving at the right speed, a voice clip would play (someone else's voice, but her words, it should be noted). She showed us a video clip of people trying to do this, and it was amusing to see how many people struggled with this physical aspect introduced into listening. They had looks of utmost concentration as they tried to yield the sound. Amusing as it may have been, it was also revealing in the way it presented listening, a thing many of us approach passively, as a complex task.

The most amusing of her conceptual works, however, was where she had some of her friends in the deaf community create their own captions to films. It was a response to how sometimes the captions in films weren't always thought about carefully and only put there for legal reasons. The audience was shown one of The Little Mermaid, where Ariel is meeting the prince on land. Captions were given such as (the sound of legs that don't know how to move), (the failure of gesture translated into cuteness) and (L) as Ariel flailed about.

She also presented us a number of drawings. Many took the form of a music score, using f to symbolize loudness and p to symbolize quiet- in an emotional sense. "The Sound of a Waiting Room" stood out to me. As the p's and f's alternate and build over time like a rhythm, they create a palpable sense of anxiety in the visual. When the f's flared up was when she said the person came in to call a name, and they tapered down to p's as the waiting resumed. Another of her series of drawings played with the idea of different kinds of futures by drawing out the movement of the ASL sign for future in differing ways. There was an ambitious future that soared upwards, and too much future: a dense and dark drawing of the sign, expressing the anxiety of our time.

During her Q&A session, I asked, "what makes you happiest about being an artist?" It's kind of a cliché question, I know, and one that she suggested was almost too big to answer. I asked because I wanted to know, as an artist myself, what her feeling of reward was in the often difficult process of creating. She answered that she feels best when she finally gets to see her ideas come to fruition- something that doesn't always happen, she noted- and the anxieties over how it will be received have passed. I think I share this feeling about my own experience. Making art can be exciting, but full of uncertainty, doubt and struggle- the moment you realize you've created something the world can interact with and respond to, it validates it all.

My favorite thing she said in her talk, however, was when she responded to a question on her background as an artist. She described that for a time, as she studied art at university, she didn't really know what her own ideas were about. It was when she finally decided to step outside her comfort zone and tackle the idea of sound, something many people would  find mind-boggling, that she realized: what it means to be an artist is to own your ideas.

She owns her ideas for certain, and I would add that they are ideas both playful and brilliant. I don't know why I had never thought of how, the same way I can hear emotion in music, emotion can be understood to be sound. Or how sound fills or doesn't fill the hours, so it can conversely be understood as time passing. It was a great experience to learn to understand it this way. The truth I think Christine Sun Kim is getting at in her work is that knowing sound isn't cut off to anyone. She removes it from the oppressive context of how hearing people have built society around it as the main mode of communication. She called it something like a "decolonization" of sound. Through collaboration with people who know ASL and those who don't, people in and out of deaf culture, she brings her understanding of sound forward on her own terms.