Interview: Artist Christine Sun Kim on exploring the Edges of Sign Language (BSL)

As artist Christine Sun Kim concludes her three-month residency with Somerset House, she sat down with The Limping Chicken’s Liam O’Dell to discuss her work Edges of Sign Language, on display at the London venue from now until 21 May.

Edges of Sign Language is all about space, so it’s amusing seeing a large group of Deaf people huddled together in a rather small room of a London art gallery to see Christine Sun Kim’s collection of four stretched and shaped canvases placed around the space.

Titled ‘Score’, ‘All Day All Night’, ‘Echo’ and ‘All’, the artwork – with rough, unrefined edges – replicate the movements a signer has to make to produce the sign in its title in American Sign Language (ASL). Immediately striking is the circular nature of ‘All Day All Night’, which almost appears as a full circle save for a small gap on the right. ‘All’ is not too dissimilar as another circular design.

“I was trying to find things that had a shape that I was attracted to – an attractive shape, in a way,” explains Kim, when I ask her why she settled on these four specific signs. “I have been using ‘future’ and ‘echo’ – the signs for those – and they have a bit of a similar shape and I’ve had that in some of my artworks already. I wanted to expand that, and find something simple – a simple word that looks good as a standalone sign.

“So some signs you need other signs to pair with them or to be around them to look good, but there’s others that you can isolate, they can be alone, and the shape as an isolated sign is nice,” she continues. “The first one was ‘Score’ that I thought of and that’s the concept I was emphasising the most. I was fascinated with the relationship that I have with sign language interpreters. I work with a lot of amazing interpreters, all over the world. I’m so lucky.”

The relationship Kim has with interpreters is something Kim finds fascinating. “The interpreter themselves impacts and influences the way my voice is conveyed and understood,” she says. “So I wanted to think about how the shape of the canvas… I wanted it to be raw, I wanted it to be unprimed, and how that will hypothetically influence what the painter would paint on the canvas.

“People are so obsessed with the painting itself. What is the paint showing you? They don’t necessarily think about how the shape – a rectangle, traditionally – impacts what you put on the canvas.”

The pieces certainly strike me as unconventional in that respect, going against the norm or ‘standard’ for art, but then again, sign language in its very nature has always been big, wide-reaching and expansive. Was it a challenge for Kim to think about where you cut off such an expressive language?

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“You got it! You got it,” she beams in response. “This is exactly it. Looking at the signer’s point of view – what are the most extreme parameters? What are the extreme limits possible from the signer’s point of view?

“For example, in an English word, how many weights can you hold? It’s like how much space can you hold in a sign when you compare it to English,” Kim continues. “The weight in English, how much weight can a word hold versus how much space can a sign hold? I think it’s really exciting for me to be experimenting with that edge and on that precipice, and look at the most extreme parameters that you can achieve.

“I just recently had another interview and I was explaining that with the Deaf community is we’re always in a bit of a strange place. Things aren’t always clear. We have to fight with protests, we fight for things,” she reveals. “I understand it, I do. We need to stay angry, but there is a point in which we’re tired.”

The Deaf community, Kim says, needs to be more playful. “We need to have more play, more fun, more laughter. We have to have fun with that – we have to have that balance.

“So when you think about the edges of each sign, we’re not focusing on making sure the world is fighting for our sign language, making it political. That’s not me. That’s not what I’m trying to do. I just want to have fun with it,” she concludes.

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And fun is certainly being had. As I turn my attention to Kim guiding a crowd through the pieces at a private viewing, I notice her referring to the pointed top of the ‘All’ piece looking like a chimney. Kim had already talked of the weight of language, and while English seems to be limited or absolute in the interpretations of a word, sign language seems a lot broader.

I ask Kim if the words took on a different meaning while designing the work. “It has a different subtext,” she replies. “I set it up where you see them and the artwork, and it becomes something else. You put it there, you put it on there, you look above it, and that one’s [All] above the fireplace. It’s actually a mirror at the moment, but it is a fireplace. You put it above the fireplace and it looks different; it takes on a different meaning.

“That’s the same with ASL and BSL, as well, how you can repeat the same sign,” explains Kim. “For example, ‘all’ versus ‘all’ with a different facial expression – this one can completely negate it. It’s the same handshape – my hands are doing the exact same thing – I’ve changed my facial expressions in a different environment and you can completely alter the entire meeting, but it’s the same sign.

“So in that way, this this sign representation in the frame can be moved to different places and essentially expressing the same change of meaning that you do in sign language with your facial expressions.”

Of course, Deaf visitors will have some understanding of the stunning physicality of sign language, the role subtext can play in meaning, and how it interacts with space, but what does Kim hope hearing people will take from the art pieces?

“I don’t really think too much about how it will be received, as long as I’m giving access – an access point,” she says. “You’ve seen the text that has been typed up about this – that’s your access point. I’ve given that to them. After that, the work is on them.

“Before, in the beginning of my career, I was worried about that. I understood that my background, my ideas, maybe seem very closed, and it’s hard to communicate that. So I felt that as I became an artist, it’s all about how you tell your story better.”

In their abstract form, the four pieces are very much open to interpretation, and visitors can make up their own mind on the artwork at Somerset House until 21 May.

More information about Edges of Sign Language can be found on the Somerset House website.

Photo: Max Creasy.

By Liam O’Dell. Liam is an award-winning Deaf freelance journalist and campaigner from Bedfordshire. He can be found talking about disability, theatre, politics and more on Twitter and on his website.

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With thanks to Anna Michaels for providing American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation.