Across the ceiling in the opening room of Christine Sun Kim’s first London exhibition, just above head height, hangs a strip of white tape containing an electrical wire. I am walking along below it, holding a clunky remote-control-like contraption that could have been made by Doc from Back to the Future, trying to keep its antennae in contact with the tape. I’m not doing very well, which is why the story I would be hearing, were I able to keep the electrical contact smooth, sounds like little more than a cacophony of broken grunts. “I’m hopeless,” I tell Kim, who is standing beside me. “Well, that’s why it’s called Game of Skill,” she says laughing.
Or to be literal, that’s what her interpreter Helsa Borinstein, says to me, translating Kim’s American Sign Language (ASL); but so seamless is the translation and so tangible Kim’s amusement that writing only a few hours later, in my memory it feels as if she were speaking in English directly to me throughout our conversation.
Born deaf in California to Korean parents in 1980, Kim – who currently divides her time between Berlin and New York – is a force to be reckoned with. She has been artist in residence at the Whitney Museum in New York, had work chosen for the prestigious MoMA PS1 exhibition in Queens, and earlier this year gave a TED talk which has had over 32,000 hits. She has also collaborated with a number of musicians, including Devonté Hynes, aka Blood Orange, who has written for Florence and the Machine, FKA twigs, Carly Rae Jepsen and the Chemical Brothers.
Short and slight, with the tips of her dark bob died electric blue, she is a striking presence: smiley and charming, but with a core of braided tungsten. You could describe her as a sound artist, but her work encompasses more than that. She is an illustrator, painter, video and performance artist, all rolled into one.
Her London exhibition includes all of these elements. In one room there is an installation of four video screens showing the same clips from films, including 2001: A Space Odyssey and Disney’s The Little Mermaid. Each screen shows the conventional subtitles, but Kim asked four more subtitlers to add words describing the other noises going on in the background: the rustle of paper, the click of footsteps, the sound of breathing.
Elsewhere the walls are hung with her illustrations, like abstract cartoons, a mixture of graphic lines reminiscent of musical staves which bend and sweep, capturing the shapes of gestures in ASL. In the past Kim’s illustrations have explored quiet sounds, expressed through the musical notation “p”, but here the emphasis is on “f” for forte, but also for the future, with which she says she is currently preoccupied. Personally or politically, I ask. “Both,” she replies.
Kim has not chosen an easy artistic path. The decision to work with sound might seem a self-defeating one for someone with restricted access to her chosen material. But this is precisely Kim’s point. Deaf people, she says, are told that sound is not for them; but sound is not just experienced through ears, it is felt through vibrations in the body (Kim likes the sound of speaker feedback and the growl of a car engine) and also, as she has put it, as a “ghost”, something she knows is there, going on, even if she doesn’t know quite what it is. In her TED talk she describes how, “Being deaf in a world of sound is like living in a foreign country blindly following the cultural rules, customs and behaviours without ever questioning them … Sound is almost like money and power. It’s so powerful that it could either disempower me and my art, or empower me. I chose to be empowered.”
But that empowerment has not come easily. One of the laugh-out-loud pieces in the show is an illustration showing two crotchets linked by a spiky black line across the top. It is called My Inner Bartesque Voice, a playful reference to Bart Simpson. It turns out she’s a huge Simpsons fan and was star struck when she met its creator Matt Groening a couple of years ago. What is the significance of Bart Simpson to her? “I think that in being an artist you need to be Bartesque,” she says. “It’s staying with your vision, which isn’t easy. But you must be uncompromising, and that’s very Bart.”
As a child she had to channel that inner Bart. She loved art from an early age, but the deaf educational programme she went through had little interest in encouraging that side of her personality. “They were so obsessed with writing and literacy and maths and science that we weren’t exposed to art,” she says. It was only in graduate school, aged 23, that she began to study art in earnest, but she found it hard to discover an artistic voice of her own. “I would draw something and I would think, ‘Oh, that looks like somebody else’s work, this doesn’t feel like me.’” Her Damascene conversion came on an artistic residency in Berlin, where every gallery, it seemed to her, was given over to sound art: “That’s when things really took off.”
It was, she says, a scary direction for her to take. It was not something she could easily discuss with her non-hearing friends: “I come from a background where most of my friends don’t talk about sound, it’s really a taboo topic.” She also found that the world of sound artists was not instantly welcoming. “In graduate school some classmates from the sound department gave me a lot of shit. And I think the perception was they’d been working on music and sound for years and years and here I am, you know, I just kind of show up, and so people were kind of looking at me like, ‘What are you bringing to this?’ and I have to deserve and earn their respect.”
I wonder if having to overcome these obstacles means that in addition to the fun and wit there’s an anger in her art. “No, but it’s interesting that you bring that up,” she says, “because I was told by a few other people that as a deaf artist, ‘People wanted to feel my anger.’ But I’m not trying to be a freak show. I make things that interest me, but there’s an expectation that people have that, as a deaf artist, you should be angry, your art should reflect your anger. Imagine if you were to say to a black artist, ‘What are your angry feelings about being black and where is that shown in your art?’ It’s sort of the parallel.”
She tells me that she hates being presented as “a disabled artist. That’s not what I’m about. I want to focus on my art, not on the fact that I am deaf.” And indeed if you look at her art, it’s not the deafness that cries out to you. It’s the sense of playfulness, of questing for meaning, of quirky personal revelation and of trying to look at the world from unexpected angles. It’s not deaf art, it’s just art.
I ask what she hopes visitors will take away from her show. “I hope they leave understanding that voices are not only sounds, they can be visual as well.”
