Interview: Christine Sun Kim

The Style Sheet: How would you describe your style and the way you work with sound and visual language? 
Christine Sun Kim: I did a year of graphic design while I was an undergrad student, and it’s had a profound impact on my practice because I better understand the impact of scale, composition and colour. A lot of my work is in black and white, and a lot of that is because I’ve been coming from a place of fear — fear of being misunderstood. Because as a deaf person sometimes I have simple misunderstandings with people. For example, I want coffee with oat milk but I get cow’s milk instead, which gives me stomach issues and I lose a day of normal functioning over a small misunderstanding. 

And so, given that I work with interpreters and so many other people, there are layers that I have to get through to be understood, and I feel the need to be as clear as possible. I accomplish that by having black text or shapes or infographics on white paper because I feel like they couldn’t be any clearer.

Your work often explores ‘echoes’ as a metaphor for communication across languages and interpretation. How did that idea take shape visually in this installation? 

The ASL sign for ‘echo’ is one hand as a still wall, then the other hand is sound moving through space hitting a surface and bouncing off. I've taken that and shifted the perspective on it. I also work with the concept of ‘future’. And when you sign ‘future’ in ASL, there are two semicircles or bumps moving away from your face. And the motion line of that is similar to the movement in the sign for echo.

So I came up with the idea for echo because it shows where sound is moving. And that makes me think of how I also work with interpreters — interpreters are my echo. That has turned into the echo hitting wall after wall, then trapping itself in a cube. And it gets so small, it's suffocating. Then it expands and suffocates and expands. You can see that in the animation, which was created by Jan Joost Verhoef. And when the trap gets smaller or when it’s released, the sound created by Matt Karmil reflects that.

The installation includes a video cube and a new floor mural. As a site-specific work, how did you imagine it interacting with the space at Pacific Place and the flow of people moving through it?

The installation is this giant cube that’s a newer version of A String of Echo Traps, which I showed as three small video cubes hung by wires at the Whitney Museum of American Art. It speaks to my idea of an echo bouncing off all sides of the cube, getting trapped in the cube. It also is trapping the echo in a way that it can never escape despite the scale.

And what I like about it being site-specific here at Pacific Place is that as a transportation hub, people will pass by it every day. That's a feature in my practice when it comes to the public artwork that I do. I like having my art be a part of people's everyday lives, whether they see it that way or not. I want deaf people and deaf culture need to be in people's faces.

How are you feeling about the upcoming meet-and-greet with the Deaf community in Hong Kong? What do you hope the participants will take away from the meeting?

I'm really looking forward to it. It's always one of my favourite parts of travelling and exhibiting because I get to learn sign languages from the countries that I'm visiting and get the deaf perspective on their lives. Many people don’t know that ASL is a full language independent of English with its own grammatical structure and history. I was just in London and I got to meet a bunch of deaf British people. British Sign Language was my first foreign sign language, and now I know German sign language because I live in Germany.

 

If you have access to language, you have access to education that leads to a better quality of life. Then you can access movies or simple things that everyone else has access to. So I like to ask the deaf community what their experience is like or how their sign language came to be. So those meetings are always a highlight.