Humor Humanizes: Christine Sun Kim in Dialogue
In the lead up to their first major museum survey, Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night, Christine Sun Kim sat down with the exhibition curators to discuss how musical notation, infographics, and language—both in her native American Sign Language (ASL) and written English—impact her wide-ranging approach to art-making.
Interpreted by Beth Staehle.
An audio book version of this conversation can be listened to below.
A digital braille version of this conversation can be downloaded here.
Pavel Pyś
You have mentioned that audiences might read your work differently, depending on their linguistic and cultural contexts. Much of your work is about communicating across different forms of lived experiences. Could you reflect on such memorable moments?
Christine Sun Kim
In part, I got into infographics because they are universal and don’t require cross-cultural conversation. During the 2015 opening night of my exhibition at Beijing’s WHITE SPACE gallery, many Chinese visitors told me that they understood my artwork, despite it being in English, and saw it in their head quite clearly.1Many Chinese collectors responded to my work so powerfully without knowing much about American Sign Language. While in the United States or maybe in Europe, I might need to speak more about my experiences, and give those viewers more time. They need a coffee, a lunch, a dinner, explanations, all the PDFs. Then, they buy the work. I found the difference interesting.
I think composition is a very powerful tool for many of my pieces. I love Ed Ruscha’s work, partly because I studied graphic design ( just for a year, but that changed my entire life). My graphic design experience showed me where to put letters; it taught me to scale and size things out, and that has impacted how people receive my pieces. I’m able to get the emotions across, maybe easier, without words. On the other hand, I also work with text. It seems like the best way to meet in the middle for people who do not know ASL.
Jennie Goldstein
I’m curious if you could speak to your experiences of intersecting identities, of being first-generation Korean American, belonging to the Deaf community and culture, having experiences of immigrating to Germany. How do these multiple identities affect your practice?
Christine Sun Kim
I always think about how all of my identities are in my practice. There’s no question they’re present, but sometimes I just don’t really have good examples of how that affects my practice. I don’t really love the term “code-switching,” but I do feel like that’s become a lifelong tool for me. I think sometimes it’s about how do you adjust yourself, code-switch yourself, without compromising your identity?
When I was young, I might have tried to be more this versus that. But when I was trying to be too Deaf, or too Korean, I would lose the other parts of me. Some- thing I’ve always really fixated on is how to make myself approachable, and how do I allow people to approach me? Is it that I initiate, or let them initiate?
Tom Finkelpearl
Disability arts studies scholar Simi Linton talks about the “vantage point of the atypical.”2 I think you have a lot of different perspectives, allowing you to look at the world from atypical angles. I’m wondering if immigrating to Germany gave you another different viewpoint?
CSK
I experience a different type of racism here than I do in the US. I grew up in California, where there is a big Korean community, and I felt like it was normal to see Koreans where I grew up. In New York, there’s so much diversity and I was accustomed to that. But having moved to Germany and being an immigrant here, I see what they see. I’m perceived as Asian first, and Deaf second. That’s been new to me and odd.
I’m also late to my Korean American identity. I feel like I’m really, really late to it. Growing up, I was just so focused on my Deaf identity, figuring out how to sign well, how to be an active member in the Deaf community, how to forge relationships with other Deaf people. I was so fixated on this that a bunch of my other identities fell to the side. It’s now time to pay attention to some of the other identities more equally. Of course, being Deaf is the most foundational part of my whole identity. It’s probably my most core identity. But I wouldn’t say that it’s my entire core. I feel so strongly about being Korean American and Deaf, both.
JG
Did you feel like your experience of moving your life to Germany made you understand your parents, aunts, and uncles differently? Did it change your understanding of your elders’ experiences?
CSK
My parents did share some stories about moving to the US, and even my partner, Thomas Mader, was a little frustrated because he wanted to hear more from them. They always say, “Oh, I don’t remember. It wasn’t really that important.” I wonder if that was a form of processing trauma for them. But having moved to Germany myself, there was a lot of work. I had to get a visa; I had to go to all the immigration offices.
I clearly remember this experience of going to one of the immigration offices by myself, not knowing German. I thought, I’ll go ahead and type on the phone, and just explain that I need to get a form. I got such a negative reaction from the staff working there, and we had such a communication breakdown that they got frustrated and were like, “Passport, now.” I pulled out my US passport and their angry demeanor instantly dropped. They thought I was just some ignorant Asian who didn’t know English, or any better. This was revealing to me. I find that people are judging me because of my physical identity, and they have these prejudices. Once I understand how they’re looking at me, I know how to navigate it best. But in Germany, it’s been different than my experiences growing up. People’s reactions usually come up in anger and frustration, and I respond back with the same. Tom says, “Christine, you have to calm down.”
I’ve also noticed with Deaf friends, they don’t always understand what triggered me to make drawings about the Deaf experience. When these Deaf friends come to Europe, they say, “Oh, Christine, I get it now.” Sometimes in the US, there’s no frame of reference for some of the work I make. In other settings, where different tensions and types of oppression are encountered, it’s possible to look back on my US experience or my childhood experience and have a reaction. Because let’s be honest, had I stayed in the US, I would never have had this experience of removal and a difference. I would never have made the Deaf Rage series, because I wouldn’t have faced some of those oppressions in the US had I stayed.
JG
I see valences of collaboration in everything you do, even when you are working alone. Could you discuss how you’ve collaborated with your family—your partner (and professional artist in his own right), Thomas Mader, as well as your daughter Roux, perhaps a future artist. How have these experiences shaped your thinking and collaborations with others?
CSK
I grew up very much within the Deaf community. I went to a mainstream public school program and there was a small group of us Deaf students who would also attend some of the public school classes. It was a smaller unit, and it always felt really protective and something that I was really attached to. My Deaf sister was in that group. Our interpreters stuck by us a lot, and I developed a weird sense of codependent relationships from a young age. In a positive way, we were very attached to each other.
In grad school, I realized that I didn’t have what I’ll call minimal “hearing people skills,” just enough to navigate the world. Some faculty members would say, “Look, Christine, I understand you’re struggling. We’ve got to learn how to collaborate, at least a little bit.” I thought about this a lot: If I have nothing to offer, how do I collaborate with these people? I applied to Recess, a residency and exhibition program in SoHo at the time, and that was a great experience because they had an amazing team. They gave me a space, and I collaborated with sculptors, writers, and painters around sound concepts. That started to form my under- standings of what it means to collaborate. You have to give in order to want to take something. I also learned more about what it means to be resourceful. I would make mistakes or accidentally insult somebody, and I had to learn how to resolve conflict. I had to learn how hearing people thought and behaved, and I had to code-switch through that process.
When it came to working with sound, I just felt so open about what to do. I felt like I could work with other musicians to learn more about sound. Whatever I wanted, I felt like I could collaborate and ask somebody to work together. That has become part of my practice and I’ve never looked back. Over time, I started collaborating more frequently with the same group of people. I have the same person painting my murals.
I work with the same interpreters over and over again. My family isn’t going anywhere. I am always open to the idea of collaborating with a new person, but what I’ve learned is that every time I collaborate with somebody who’s not a family member, I start with the question “Do I have the final say?” I want that position. It’s not that we have the final say, it’s that I have the final say. I do this because when you start a collaborative relationship, there’s always a power dynamic and a power inequality. While somebody might start out with more power, ultimately, we might end on equal footing, but if I come in on equal footing with somebody, I usually leave the dynamic with less power. I have to step up myself that way, so it all equals out in the end.
Now, I feel really fortunate that every time I do a lecture or performance somewhere like a philharmonic or opera house—places that get super heavy on hearing things and are in a sense inaccessible—Deaf audiences still come and see me, and I am so thankful. And oftentimes when I am in these hearing spaces, Deaf audiences will say that it’s their first visit. A Deaf person might say “I’ve never been to this museum/opera/ festival before,” because they found it inaccessible. I am lucky to have people who are willing to put themselves outside of their comfort zone and support me. That’s so meaningful, and I feel so thankful for them. Every time
I do a project and I invite people to come, I particularly care about the Deaf attendees, ensuring that they’re there and that they feel invited and welcome.
At the time, I went through a phase where I made the decision to no longer run back to my Deaf friends. I decided to fully leave that comfort zone and join the hearing world. I did that because I had always set up these rules for myself. If I become friends with some- body who is not Deaf, I would say, “You have to learn sign language, you have to do this, you have to do that.” Eventually, it’s not sustainable, so I decided to get rid of that rule. I would say I’m still in the hearing world fully, to some extent, but I do make that transition easily to go back to the Deaf world. But I needed to fully break it off with no plan B, no backup, and give myself that chance to go mainstream into society. And now I feel at ease transitioning between the two worlds. What does that look like to give a lecture using performance or writing or smell? I also wanted to see what the reverse experience would be for people, and set these rules. I would say I wouldn’t go back to that phase. I collaborate differently now.
JG
Do you have a sense that you collaborate with people who don’t know they’re collaborating with you? In other words, who or what might be in the room with you, metaphorically or literally, when you’re working? Are you thinking about influences?
CSK
There are two ways that I reference this. One is artistically, by myself, without collaboration. And then there’s another way that I go about things, where I get fixated on different artists who maybe write instructions, like a score. I might be thinking of John Cage as an obvious reference, or Pauline Oliveros. I’m thinking about other artists and how they convey instructions that lead to collaboration. How did they command their presence? I have a constant curiosity around that. I think about my interpreters a lot. It is a relationship where you really do have to be close to them. You are working from one language to another. There has to be trust, transparency, and a lot of my references to collaboration come from my experience of working with interpreters because it is inherently collaborative.
Another collaboration that I think about is the way in which I learned that hearing people are actually not all smart. Some hearing people are dumb. I don’t really know how to say this because growing up in an educational environment with audiologists and teachers, these were all hearing people in authority, and it always seemed like these were adults who knew best for me. That’s typical of the medical field. These are people who think they know better than you and they might, but not always. Hearing people know that, but I didn’t have access to that information, and I had an inferiority complex. Then I learned that hearing people are just normal humans.
PP
In an interview with Matthew Hyland, you mentioned that your experience in pursuing an MFA in sound art left you feeling a bit suffocated, and that you instead turned away from sound toward drawing.3 You mentioned Pauline Oliveros and John Cage. I’m curious how you would describe your work in relation to a twentieth- century history of artists experimenting somewhere between sound and image, and exploring the languages of scores and graphic notation.
CSK
I think a lot of it has to do with the act of mark-making, whether that’s charcoal or making a score. I feel like the practice of making some kind of mark is there. When I think of twentieth-century artists, there’s a lot of commentary on concept and instruction, like scores and performances, just like my practice.
When I was in grad school, I decided to join sound art, and I got a lot of references for names of artists and people to know about. I didn’t know where to start, so I just chose artists who were most accessible to me, and John Cage was one of them. I just used them, if you will, as a gateway. I needed a little bit more time to understand some of the other artists, to do more reading, more research, to have more in-person experiences of their work. But I’m also drawn to artists like Cage and Oliveros because they don’t follow rules; they just do what they want. They just set up their own rules. And I really do like that. Nam June Paik, whom I often think of as my ancestor, didn’t follow the rules either. I think that’s why I gravitate toward their practices, because I think my work sometimes feels so vague. I don’t know where I belong.
Tony Conrad once told me he thought my ideas went in many different directions, and I don’t feel like I entirely belong in the sound art community, or the lineage of conceptual art, or any groupings. Because of that, I feel like when I see any artwork that has more than one connection, or more than one identity, or more than one control to it, it allows me to relate better. I think those aspects have been a huge influence on me. I admire Christian Marclay, because his work is generous and offers many access points, both to art and non-art audiences alike. I often think of Glenn Ligon and how clever he is with inhabiting various voices. I also think that another big influence that Cage and Oliveros, and other artists, have had on me is the fact that they’ve worked with people without working with people. To some extent, I feel like my work is also a lot about that. Half the time, I feel like I actually do have to work with people in person; I cannot opt out. But then the other half, it’s out there whether I do or not.
PP
You’ve been in the art world for more than a decade, having started as an educator before fully dedicating yourself to making art, and your work has done a lot to elevate the importance of access and diverse forms of lived experience. Have you noticed significant changes in how museums work with artists?
CSK
Whenever I meet museum educators from another country, they usually say, “Oh, I saw your Whitney videos and they taught me how to give tours that were accessible.” It’s always really touching because I didn’t realize they had an impact outside the US. International educators ask if we can work together and I keep making connections with other countries, which has been really amazing. For example, I know two Deaf sisters from the Netherlands and they’ve set up tours that are accessible; they do museum video visits, and things like that. A lot of places outside the US have a lot of room to grow. It’s really exciting. In the US, there might be a little bit of a loss of interest. It’s like being in a long-term relationship: the spark’s gone a bit, and you’re just very comfortable with each other. When I had one of my early museum internships, I had become bored with it, and I moved over to the Whitney and was much happier there. But the Whitney didn’t offer Deaf tours led by Deaf educators. I had to say to education colleagues, “We should do museum tours led by Deaf people so that you don’t have to bring in interpreters.” We did that, and it was this huge victory.
Whenever I’m communicating with an interpreter, I change my signing styles to ensure that I’m better understood by them. What that means is I don’t sign as I usually would because I’m thinking about a different audience. But when you can be a Deaf educator and you can give Deaf tours to Deaf people in sign language, it gets really exciting. Today, some institutions won’t hire Deaf educators without a master’s degree. At the time, MoMA was like that, and I think it’s tough, then, to find people who qualify. It’s also great to just give workshops, give tours, to provide interpreters at institutions. You can do that now, when you used to not
be able to, or it wasn’t an idea just yet. I’ve also seen handheld devices that have the tour information in sign language, which is really exciting.
The question remains of how to better integrate this with what’s already offered. I do wonder how often interpreters are provided for panels, how many videos are captioned or interpreted with picture-in-picture interpreters. I’m seeing new questions emerge and I feel like I can measure, from the past to the present, a change. I also have noticed that institutions had eagerness and then, maybe after five or six years, stopped doing that practice. It could have been as simple as something as a change of leadership, like the new person making those decisions or rubber-stamping those decisions didn’t share the same enthusiasm, and so the practice goes away. I’ve seen some museums stay constant in that practice or that promise, but not all of them across the board.
Oftentimes, the existing group of Deaf educators is quite small, and so there are maybe a few who are working with all the museums in one city. Even in New York, we have Alexandria Wailes, Debra Cole, Joyce Hom, Lauren Ridloff, Emmanuel von Schack, Zavier Sabio. Those people are spread thin, and I would love to see more employment opportunities, more people staffed in more institutions.
TF
Whenever you start working with someone, you circulate your access rider, a document that outlines your language preferences and a list of resources related to your work and Deaf culture. Why did you start the rider? What function does it serve for you as an artist? What does it mean for you?
CSK
I was doing a lot of studio visits. People would come to my home studio and sometimes we’d type back and forth. Sometimes I’d have an interpreter in person, or an interpreter joined over Zoom. No matter what, I noticed that I was pretty much the first Deaf artist, sometimes even first Deaf person, they ever met in person. I don’t lip-read or use my voice as a main mode of communication. I remember there was a big-time curator who came to my home studio and didn’t realize that there was Deaf culture. Out of an hour-long appointment, I spent forty-five minutes talking about deafness and Deaf culture, leaving only fifteen minutes to talk about my work.
That got really frustrating, and I got fed up. I reached out to Gan Uyeda, partner at François Ghebaly Gallery, and he said, “Why don’t we write something together?” It’s really thanks to his push that together we were able to come up with an access rider. I realized in the process that it also benefits me in interviews too. People often just have so many questions about how to work with a Deaf person like me. I find that people interviewing me have also never written about a Deaf person or deafness before. Sometimes I think about this—how can you write about a person when you have no context of their culture or language, and yet you’re writing an article or profile on them? If somebody’s writing about a community, they’re a representative of the community. But in my experience, I’m usually the first person they’ve ever met from a certain community, and they’re not from it. A lot of interviews came out fucking cringe, and I really didn’t like the way that felt.
The access rider was created to protect myself and to save my time. I didn’t want to do the extra labor in bridging these cultures together. That’s been my big point. This way, I can be more efficient and smart about my own time, rather than having to take time to follow up, to tell people not to use “hearing impaired” when refer- ring to me and explaining why. It’s all in the rider.
Now, some organizers, curators, and writers read it; most do, some just don’t, so it doesn’t always work as intended. Part of the rider talks about how to frame my work. It also offers resources, basically a crash course on Deaf culture. It includes a bio, selected inter- views and video clips, what photos to use of me. My favorite part is a section on terminology that I prefer not to be used when referring to me, like “silence,” “can’t hear,” etc. The rider talks about why I started using it in the first place; it offers an explanation. That’s what I really do like about it.
TF
In a New York Times article, artist Finnegan Shannon praised the playfulness in Emilie Gossiaux’s recent solo show. They noted that “people in mainstream culture tend to talk about disability in somber terms,” which is “‘always such a funny contrast to my experience as a disabled person where there’s a lot of humor.’”4 Is that something that you agree with?
CSK
I agree entirely, which is why I’m tired of being serious. For the Deaf and disability community, oftentimes it’s so hardwired to rebel; protests activate at every corner to respond, and I do understand. But at times, I wonder, where then is the space to play and have fun, and to not have to be serious and to not have to fight for your rights, so to speak. Sometimes, I feel like not being serious minimizes the fight for more rights, and so I do think about how I can do something without sending the wrong message. How can I have fun without diminishing the importance of people’s rights? It’s important to do something as simple as play. It seems silly that we have to think about playing when that’s all we did when we were younger, and to remind ourselves to go back to play and the importance of it. Humor humanizes us. It allows for people to take our rights more seriously.
PP
You have made drawings, animations, performances, moving image works, shaped canvases, and large- scale site-specific commissions. You even had a plane fly with a banner as part of Captioning the City (2021). What haven’t you made? What haven’t you tried? What do you want to experiment with?
CSK
I’m afraid that I’m going to say an idea, and then now it’s going to never happen. If it’s documented in a book, I feel like it’s doomed to fail. I do have some things I’ve mentioned in the past, and nothing’s happened, so I feel like I’d better shut up! ▪︎︎
Interested in learning more about this artists work? Pick up the exhibition catalog at shop.walkerart.org
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