10 Questions with Kang Ma

Kang Ma is a human being born and raised and currently based on the planet Earth.

He could also be referred to as a visual artist (even though some of his works are not really visual) or a graphic designer for the sake of an easier understanding of what he is. If the planet Earth is not specific enough for you, he was born in Xianyang (which many people probably have never heard of), China, and raised in Shenzhen, China. He came to the States to study Graphic Design in 2017 and graduated in 2021. Currently, he lives in New Haven, CT, and occasionally goes to New York City to teach.

makang.world | @kang_ma_km

ARTIST STATEMENT

The works of an artist are responses, reactions to, or comments on what they encounter or what they seek. At the same time, these responses are not solely for the artist but, more importantly, for their audience. Making artwork is about addressing the audience. That is to say, as an artist, Kang consciously avoids pursuing specific aesthetics or styles as much as he can. Instead, he focuses on making his works work, in other words, on how they would be perceived and interpreted by the audience.

Kang believes that artists shouldn't limit themselves to only a few topics and media. However, there are two topics that he has been interested in and explored more than others.

Translation and lost in translation is one of the topics he works on. Only mapping signifiers to other sets of signifiers is not enough to achieve understanding. This is what he tried to reveal in the project "Translate English into English". Kang has also explored how machines translate the contents of one kind of media into another kind of media, of which the projects titled "Deprinter" and "Sharpness Being Worn Out By Ricoh MP30035" are examples. Another aspect of this topic that he has been dealing with is related to sound—how he, as a human being, interprets the sound of a foreign language with the syllable of his native tongue, how he, as a non-professional human being, interprets the professionally and industrially made music which including the sounds of multiple musical instruments with his own one and only human mouth. He experimented with this aspect of the translation topic in the continuous sound art series project "Around South East Coast And East Coast Karaoke Symphony Orchestra".

Another topic that he explores in his works is "links and connections", which include experimenting with the possibilities of using hyperlink as a tool for creating non-linear narratives in both printed and digital media, the projects "Infinite Clicks", "A Hopeful Story" and "The History of the World" are examples. The small comic book titled "How did Steve Jobs Invent Ladder?", on the other hand, is a joke kind of illustrates some of his thoughts on the "connections".

The Histroy of the World, Photography & Image Making & Book, 7x10.5 in, 2019 © Kang Ma

INTERVIEW

Let’s talk about you first. Why are you an artist, and how did you become one?

Ok, my answer to how I became an artist might sound absurd.
I originally wanted to be a pop singer after watching a Chinese animation series about high school bands when I was in elementary school. Then I started trying to learn some instruments and singing when I went to junior high, but apparently, I didn’t do them well. And then, when I went to senior high, the school I went to had “fine-art students’ classes” in which students learn some basic drawing and painting in addition to regular subjects in order to be accepted by art schools or colleges with art majors when they enter college. So I was like, “OK, maybe I can’t be a singer or musician, but fine art and music, they are both kinds of ‘art’, and it’s probably more fun than just studying normal subjects anyway.”
That’s kind of how it started, I guess, even though those “fine art” courses are pretty rigid and have nothing to do with creativity or self-expression. And I actually wasn’t even good at those “fine art” and didn’t even get the minimum required grades in the exam when I was supposed to, so I ended up spending one more year in high school. But it was also starting from senior high, and I was exposed to some kinds of “subcultures” like rock music, and some “contemporary art”, some “rebellious articles” that were criticizing the educational system etc., I think those stuff influenced me.
Then when I got into college, I wasn’t able to get into an art school. So I ended up majoring in Industrial Design in a “design school”, and after the third year, I found the program was kinda boring, generally speaking. The goal of the program is all about winning some prize or getting a job as a commercial industrial designer in a company and most of the teachers in the program hate “art”, and they would even say something like “you are here to learn to be a designer, not an artist”, which was ridiculous (like we did have painting and drawing classes and art history, design history class as freshmen, but then we are told to avoid being artistic…).
In my senior year, I took a web design class, which was how I started doing web-related stuff and coding. The class was not conceptually interesting, but I enjoyed learning those technical skills, and coding eventually became a significant part of my artistic practice.
And I was lucky because there was a teacher who taught in the visual communication program at my school who was actually doing a lot of interesting art stuff. So when I had to complete my thesis project, I reached out to him asking if he could be my thesis advisor. That’s when I really started learning graphic design and got onto the path I’m currently on.

How did Steve Jobs Invent Ladder?, Comics & Pencil & Risograph, 5.5x8.5 in, 2018 © Kang Ma

You are a visual artist and graphic designer based on the planet Earth. What do you think differentiates yourself and your practice from others?

That’s a hard question to answer since I don’t really pursue any specific style, genre, or stuff like that. I don’t intentionally avoid any specific style, either. If I really have to pinpoint, I guess much of my work has some improvised feeling, “improvisation” can be considered as part of my methodology. Or, to put it another way, many of my works have the “get the thing done using whatever is available”, and “just make it work in some way” spirit in them. The goal is still to find the appropriate way to create something that properly communicates or interacts with my audience with whatever materials and resources in my reach.

What inspired you to pursue a career in art and design?

As mentioned before, several of my high school classmates, some subculture-related journals and books I read, and music I listened to when I was in senior high school and college, and the college professor who introduced me to the subject of graphic design.

Your work deals primarily with communication and how we interact with other people. What messages are you trying to communicate with your art?

I think that not only am I dealing with communication and how we interact with other people, but so are all the other artists in the world because art, in general, is about communicating and interacting with the presumed audience.
Regarding the message I’m trying to convey, it depends on which piece of work you are talking about. Every piece of my work communicates different things. For example, the piece Translate English Into English tries to reveal “only mapping signifiers to other sets of signifiers is not enough to achieve understanding”, the piece You Never Can Tell is about “Images do not necessarily reveal the truth, or they do, but anyway, you never can tell”, sometimes the message could even be “I really hate this project which I have to work on right now.” As you can see, they all have different messages, which is also why there isn’t really any visual style or aesthetic throughout all my work because they are about different topics.
And I probably shouldn’t continue this “explaining my work in one sentence”, because by doing so, I translated what the audience would get in the experience of viewing or interacting with my work into words, and lots of nuances is lost in this translation.

Another key theme in your production is that of translation, not just from one language to another but also between human and machine languages or through the interpretation of sounds. Are these themes inspired by your personal experience as a Chinese living in the US?

Yes, the experience of me living in the US as a non-native speaker is one of the inspirations of these works. When I started living in a language environment totally different from my native tongue, I kind of realized that using a different language is actually affecting the message I want to communicate.
When I translate something in my mind from Chinese into English, no matter how accurate I try to be, it won’t be exactly the same. The meaning is changed in subtle ways. Some concepts in one language are just hard to translate into another language, if not impossible, so some meanings are lost sometimes, and new meanings are added in the process of translation.
And then as part of the process of creating works, there are many occasions that we need to also deal with translating the work from one format to another format, from one medium to another medium, and it was also part of the art education I got when I was at school.
Another inspiration was that I still like singing, and I enjoy karaoke, and I also like just singing along when I listen to songs. Moreover, when I sing along with songs, I sometimes also do the instrument part with my mouth when I get familiar enough with the song.
And of course, I’m not a professional singer, my interpretation of the song would be non-professional and bad, and the interpretation of instrumental or electronic sound in the music with my mouth would also be weird and absurd. And sometimes, when I try to do all the different instruments and sing at the same time, then I mess up the beat and rhythm. In the beginning, it was all just like my little hobby.
But then one day, I just thought that maybe this form is actually a form of “art” or “language”, and the badness and unprofessionality of it is actually something that makes it distinctive. I know there are similar kinds of art forms like accapella or beat-box that’s also people interpreting instrumental sound, but these art forms are “too good”, “too polished”, whereas the way I do it is “bad” and “rough”, it preserves more noise and misinterpretation, and that’s all that matters.
At the same time, I also recalled some of the very first pieces of English songs covered by Chinese singers I used to listen to, the singer was like naturally interpreted the English language entirely with Chinese syllables, which I found incredibly fascinating, and I also realized that this is how new dialects and languages are created—misinterpretation. So I decided to combine those different aspects of interpreting sounds into one project: unprofessionally interpreting instrumental sound and naturally messing up the beat and rhythm of the songs, interpreting English words with Mandarin syllables. Then it became the project which I named Around South East Coast and East Coast Karaoke Symphony Orchestra.

Communication is a fundamental need for human beings. Do you think art, being almost a universal language, can help people communicate even if they come from extremely different backgrounds and contexts?

Actually, I feel the other way around. Artworks also work within their own context, and if the audience doesn’t know the context of the work, they might not be able to understand the work. That’s also why galleries put labels beside artworks—to provide context for comprehension. And that’s why artists need to think about who they are talking to when they make an artwork and use the language that the presumed audience can comprehend and relate to.

How has your art evolved over the years? And how has your approach to art changed?

Perhaps there have been technical skill improvements like I learned more coding stuff. But I feel the fundamental methodology of my practice hasn’t really changed much, I still improvise a lot while creating works, and I still try to avoid pursuing aesthetics and try to focus on how to make the work “work”, in other words, how my works address the audience.

You work with different mediums. Is there anything else you would like to experiment with? Or any other technique you would like to introduce into your practice?

Yes, I would like to experiment with different mediums. Video is something I’m really interested in, and I actually want to acquire more video production skills. And if I have the chance and resources, I would also like to try something physically spatial.

Translate English into English, Web, 2022 © Kang Ma
**translateenglishintoenglish.com**

You also teach in New York City. Where do you see art going in the next few years? What are the trends and topics that will become prevalent in the future?

I’m really not someone who pays a lot of attention to trends, so predicting the trends is something quite beyond my ability. Since we live in a world where we are surrounded by all types of computers, I would say that coding is probably more and more useful, but that might be just because it’s where my interest lies. The impact of technologies on our society and our lives is an essential topic, but again I wouldn’t call it a trend. It’s really just a topic that has always been significant and that everyone should consider.

And lastly, what are your plans for the future? Do you have any exhibition or collaboration you would like to share with our readers?

I have the plan to put online a website called abunchoffiles.com next year, on which I want to post interactive web artworks on it from time to time.

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