In my book, Spoiled, I engage with a group of contemporary Asian American artists who expose and unravel the expectation that their work should heal and repair the wounds of racial difference as injury. To be spoiled is to be excessively indulged, but to also go rotten, to turn. Spoilage marks a desire that cannot hold what it seeks to consume. It de-idealizes the kinds of autonomous subjecthood we strive for with an aggressive appetite that deforms and disfigures. The artists in my book touch upon these multiple meanings of the spoiled through a handling of what the body marked by difference consumes, excretes, and ruins, as a reminder that processes of healing and repair—the pursuit of safety, boundaries, containment, and wholeness—can be painful, inflicting damage and destruction in their wake.
Artist and writer TJ Shin is one of my book’s subjects. If spoilage draws attention to the violence and damage of repair, Shin’s multimedia work makes perceptible what that violence and damage generate over time. Shin’s practice moves through the spoilage of excess, differentiation, and breakdown. They experiment with forms of duration, recursion, and communication by producing copies or duplicates of objects and sounds, not to restore or preserve their idealized origins but to ruin them; and rather than decide what is the right assertion of presence, they flesh out the contours of absenteeism.
In their recent essay “Paranoiac Time, Desynchronic Time,” Shin makes use of film and video’s “projective logic of perception” to apprehend the underlining hostility and aggression of Cold War strategies of deterrence and the interventionist model of neutrality. Deterrence and neutrality are seemingly for the sake of de-escalation and the mitigation of violence—for keeping things, on the surface, uneventful and the same. Shin points out that these objectives necessitate the projection of a stable, continuous image of one’s self, or one’s side, nation, or allies, without the betrayal or compromise of difference. In order to deter a threat, one must learn to see one’s self through the eyes of an opponent, and transform that self-image into a reproducible, identifiable pattern, an accepted norm.
For Shin, such projected images, with their information, meaning, and effects, are disrupted and diverted in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s film work Permutations (1976). In it, the portrait of an Asian woman from multiple perspectives flickers on the screen. Three images are of Cha’s sister, and only one image is of Cha herself. For Shin, the absence of narrative plot, without a recognizable time signature or pattern, produces moments of “differentiation” irreducible to a coherent subject formation made to appear via social categories of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality. The work, played on loop, interrupts a logic of reproduction via identification, not aiming for sameness but for the breakdown that comes with and from difference. Permutations spoils itself and its viewer with its excessive repetition that veers into contingency and formlessness, tending to what Cha describes as “history, the old wound.”
Spoiled was published this past October, and I have wanted to stay in conversation with Shin because of how their newer projects, which attend to the ruptures of closed systems of meaning and to excessive differentiation without clear logic, continue to shape my understanding of spoilage beyond the scope of the book. At the end of this past summer, I met Shin at their studio in downtown Los Angeles. They were preparing for their public installation at Clockshop, Songs of Emerging Endangerment, and in the background, a television monitor played one of their recent works, a durational live stream titled Gotta Make Time (GMT) (2025). As we talked, I found that our exchange became a way of seeing how their thinking continues to spoil my own, and vice versa.
Summer Kim Lee’s book, Spoiled, 2025. Courtesy of Duke University Press.
Summer Kim Lee: I’m thinking about what you describe in the press release for Gotta Make Time as the “poetic ambiguities” of the time your live stream captures, and how we’re in it right now. It’s like we’re belatedly inhabiting a moment of time that is excessive yet necessary for keeping things on track. Like we’re using time the way we should by wasting it.
TJ Shin: I was interested in the idea of a drift, return, or absence from a certain universal standard. The eleven-day live stream was timed to the discrepancy between the solar and lunar calendars that many non-Western calendars observe, which accumulates into a leap month every two to three years, this year falling on July 25. With the help of Final Hot Desert [gallery] in London, we staged a live stream from a Travelodge hotel room overlooking the Royal Greenwich Observatory, the prime meridian, and premiered it simultaneously at Benny’s Video in New York.
It’s interesting to consider what happens when you disavow a certain temporal-spatial standard, and how you then measure its perceivable effects. Without a clear determination of the value of the eleven days as either excess or absence, the image shifts between finitude and endlessness, shifting between disappointment and surprise. You find yourself anticipating anticipation or expecting expectation.
SKL: With disappointment and surprise together, you’re describing a doubled way of inhabiting time—a paranoid way and I think what you would call a desynchronic way, which you talk about in “Paranoiac Time, Desynchronic Time.” Paranoia is shaped by disappointment because the paranoiac tries to anticipate everything in advance and for that reason always ends up feeling too late—too late to have caught on to some abstract, all-encompassing, totalizing system like a time standard on a global scale, but also patriarchy or capitalism. Alternatively, the desynchronic—maybe not so far off from how scholar Eve Sedgwick talks about reparative modes of reading—is open to the nonlinear discovery of surprises, to the smaller things that can’t add up to a system, to what can’t be known in advance. The desynchronic is drift. It’s not continuous, progressive, or accumulative.
TS: Yes, exactly! The desynchronic emerges in the gaps, digressions, and static that can’t be anticipated or systematized. And paranoia, as you mention, wants to get ahead of it. I’m interested in these eleven days not just measuring time out of sync, but producing these affective conditions that shape the work’s form. It also ties to my interest in absenteeism that encompasses a range of strategies, including refusal and liminality. Whereas refusal is a form of resistance to an outside demand, liminality occupies a space of indeterminacy. Absenteeism suggests that it can do both, deferring both expectations and linearity.
SKL: When I think of absenteeism, I think of the utterance “Go on without me.” It could be understood as permission. There’s the refusal of something being asked of you, and there’s the giving of permission for something to happen without you. There’s a belatedness about absenteeism then—a way of pulling back time, or staying back, except it’s not withdrawal. It’s an assertion of the form of absence into presence.
TS: Yeah, and perhaps that permission is also illusory. And perhaps that’s the affective form of absenteeism, because it doubles and self-propagates. It just generates the aura of presence. I’m also thinking about the way that GMT was produced, and how I was never physically present in London to set up the live stream. Perhaps that’s another aesthetic strategy of absenteeism: the quantification of space and time, where the work emerges through discrete units or structures appearing as presence.
SKL: I see that quantification—the precision of presence and pattern—in your reading of Cha’s Permutations. I think there’s the tendency and desire to read Cha’s work as her taking away something—the self, her self—through a framework of opacity, but I think your reading of it, through absenteeism, uncovers something else. She bestows presence, through the image of her sister, in a way that continues to present a problem that is temporal and also social, as a source of hostility to the ways we encounter and make sense of a subject marked by difference, now rendered different from herself.
TS: That essay is laid out in three parts, and in the last section, I discuss Cha’s works. It’s hard to affirm only one singular reading of Permutations, because the noise is actually resistant to that entirely. So I wanted to write about the work in a way that could present these possibilities, or at least, the possibilities that emerge in the negativity of her work, patterns of difference constructing a shared space of anticipation or a field of reception, what she calls “the dream of the audience.” I think she actually takes on the role of the conduit.
TJ Shin, Gotta Make Time (GMT), 2025. Durational livestream. Courtesy of the artist.
SKL: Like the noise that comes from GMT, while it plays and surprises you here [in your studio], interrupting how you might move through your day. You’re also putting yourself within that position of wanting to be attuned to the noise, the static.
TS: Right, the conduit takes on that recursive position, open to what passes through. It refers to a formative value between two points or a channel of communication, without asserting the content of the communication itself. Rosalind Krauss defines a conduit as a body centered between two machines that are the opening and closing of a parenthesis. I’m interested in taking on that function that returns and calls back, and applies its own set of rules and conditions to generate something that can only be collectively imagined.
SKL: You note that in Permutations, the three images of Cha’s sister from three different perspectives are nonsequential, interrupting linear narrative time. Her subject position is caught up in what you describe as “insistent redundancy or abstract urgency.” In the cut of images, Cha draws attention to the subject as a container of the content of communication, rather than that content itself.
This makes me think of your work Y/N [2025], where you bound eight hardcover books by hand, each of which, word for word, reproduced canonical British texts you read when you were young. The spines of the books all included the original titles and author’s names, but preceded by your own name, so they read “TJ Shin’s.” The parentheses that are opened and closed become the covers of a book. Or rather the apostrophe of “TJ Shin’s” makes you the container or the books’ covers, instead of the subject of the books you’ve read and reread and made and remade. Your I doesn’t quite appear, but flickers, like the images in Permutations, or like the turning of a page.
This is from a different standpoint, but I’m reminded of psychic forms of resistance, which Adam Phillips recently wrote about. We resist what we can’t tolerate, what we can’t bear to face, what would impinge on a sense of self. At the same time, Phillips points out that resistance is a way of unconsciously wanting to be recognized by another. We hope that someone else notices when and what we’re resisting. I think Cha’s work and your work Y/N are another way of resisting and asking to be noticed in a particular way.
TS: Yes, there’s a certain irony in the title of that series being “TJ Shin’s” given that the content of the work is entirely depersonalized. In the context of fanfiction, “Y/N” stands for “Your Name,” a placeholder that allows the reader to insert their own name into the story, making them the protagonist. So I think the mode of resistance you’re referring to is, in some sense, both an obligation and concession made in recognition—a form of resistance that operates in your name. My name serves as a proxy for the reader’s and a visible placeholder for my own resistance to legible subjectivity.
I was inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’s text Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, in which Pierre Menard, a twentieth-century French writer, attempts a total identification with Cervantes, the seventeenth-century Spanish author of Don Quixote, allowing him to recreate the text verbatim. I thought that was compelling: how reproduction through absence presents a formal and conceptual problem of surface and identity, constructed through trace or palimpsest. Similarly, I wanted to recreate the realities of these four British texts word for word, with my name on the covers, so as to allow the next reader to become their own author and bookend.
SKL: It’s like Cha becomes a bookend, too, reproducing through absence—where absence is, like you say, not a site of impoverishment, but maybe what I understand to be spoiled, because it marks what has been shorn away or cast off for the sake of the wholeness and containment of a message, the content of communication, the subject, the psyche as closed systems. So maybe for me, when I think about absenteeism, I’m also thinking about what gets dumped or cast away in order to be absent, to take leave. I like the idea of leaving as a thing you can take.
I see a connection between your recent work and interest in absenteeism, to Georges Bataille’s description of informe, translated to formlessness. Thinking about informe helped me get to the spoiled. Informe is not about lack, but the way things fall apart, corrode, or get ruined. Given what you’re saying, I’m thinking about processes of deformation as endless.
Brent Hayes Edwards riffs off of Bataille to say that informe has “no right to form,” and points out the insult of that. How you’re describing flexible, mutable forms caught up in systems makes me think of what is seen as not having the right to form, but also what can’t be persuaded to take one either—also an insult.
TJ Shin, Revision (It takes 22,000 minutes or 367 hours to project 150 miles of film at 24 frames per second, which is the equivalent of walking an average pace of 0.41 miles per hour or 47 minutes per mile for 150 miles.), 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
TS: It’s interesting your note about the difference between what refuses to take form and what is forced to remain formless. I’m thinking about my project With Tides of the Wild [2024], a 16mm-film installation exploring the Korean DMZ, a Cold War landscape that is simultaneously contested, surveilled, and often forgotten.
I frequently heard the DMZ described as “frozen in time.” It’s been eighty years since the division of Korea. I began to think about the conception of nature and conservation of time as containment of differences, generating the political and spatial impasse of the Korean War. It disarms the experiencing subject and renders political resistance as largely resolved, forgotten, or hidden from view. When a landscape is rendered absorptive and static, suspended and managed in a state of historical stasis, your perception of time isn’t linear, nor does it follow a historical progression.
And I think that’s where my interest in endlessness and recursion started. I began to think about film and time-based media, where the politics of landscape can emerge alongside its conditions of visibility. Rather than formalizing the landscape as a backdrop, I wanted to approach it as a form—its historical disjunctures and cyclicality, the boundaries and protraction of state violence flipping with endlessness.
SKL: Your work makes a connection between the endlessness of informe as temporal ambiguities and also as repetition and mimicry. In your current public installation with Clockshop, Songs of Emerging Endangerment, you put out a call for people of the diaspora to record themselves imitating the calls of particular species of birds, which are then imitated by another person, creating this chain of copies to complicate the idea of origins and closed systems of meaning and communication. The recorded and rerecorded voice becomes a degraded medium, giving way to the dissolution of noise.
TS: Yes, and those imitated calls are projected on a timer to strike every hour from dawn to dusk through a reproduction of a mid-century air-raid siren. During the Cold War, the sirens were employed as part of the city’s civil-defense system to warn of imminent attack. There’s this really amazing text by Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” He lays out the fundamental problems of the dialectics of identification, arguing that mimicry both transforms the disciplines of power and, through its slippage and latency, reproduces the colonizing discourse of surveillance. It’s inescapable because the mode in which we understand something is through mimicry and mastery. In order to master, you mimic, and in mimicking, you come to master.
The text challenged me to think about the dialectics of structural and affective negativity, that our will to transform something extends a certain kind of legacy, or epistemic violence. But then it also creates. As recordings are iterated or omitted, each act of imitation produces a new relationship between proliferation, chance, and disappearance by the changes it leaves behind. And I was interested in how long a system can repeat itself until it becomes massified, until it can surpass or displace the old one, an old image, or the dominant order.
TJ Shin, Revision (It takes 22,000 minutes or 367 hours to project 150 miles of film at 24 frames per second, which is the equivalent of walking an average pace of 0.41 miles per hour or 47 minutes per mile for 150 miles.), 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
SKL: Before it becomes another origin or—thinking of Judith Butler on performativity—before it becomes “a copy for which there is no original.”
TS: Another way to think about it is negativity pulling in stronger negativity, in which it becomes an object, an effect, and an event, and it’s able to traverse all three. And I think that’s the way I also wanted to think about this project. There’s, you know, romanticism around the return to an ideal or origin, but I think there’s nothing to return to. And I think that’s really alienating for a lot of people, and for me, too— to think that all we are left with is a trace of our active imitations. So can we imagine that what we have then is our social alienation?
I mean, I laugh, but I’m hoping that it’s generative because then it disrupts a certain analogy—it’s no longer about resemblance. It’s no longer about the substitutability of a rule. Then it allows us to make our own rules at a certain point.
SKL: I like how you’re describing negativity that pulls into further, stronger negativity. Mimicry isn’t affirmation but the thing that starts to ruin, or spoil, or undermine itself. It’s its own kind of negative social practice that attends to the negativity that is integral to the ways we navigate our relations in a social world.
TS: It becomes provisional too. And I think that’s really important, the temporality of it. That if it doesn’t work, then we’re free to abandon it. And that abandonment, I think, is really important.
SKL: Not responding to the call or responding differently to change the call. I think that’s part of what I was hoping the spoiled could capture— the mimic not only as the site of the reproduction of norms and the pressures of assimilation as a painfully failed endeavor, but also the mimic who, in laying it on too thick, in recording after recording, wears something down. Spoilage as object, effect, event that through the excessive reproduction of the same actually ruptures sameness.
It makes me think of Julie Tolentino’s durational performance HONEY [2009–24], which Tolentino has performed various times over the past several years, and is in the coda of my book. Tolentino is fed honey for hours by her collaborator Pigpen (Stosh Fila), who sits above Tolentino and pours globs of honey on a gold thread that drops into Tolentino’s mouth. There’s repetition with the honey made over and over again, which Tolentino thinks of as forms of communication—another medium. There’s also these tape recorders Tolentino holds in her hands. With one recorder she plays Chavela Vargas singing “Soledad,” which she records with the other recorder. Then she rewinds the second recorder, presses play, and records with the first recorder, and so on, going back and forth. She uses analogue tape recorders, so the honey gets into the recorders and jams the tapes.
I actually don’t know if Tolentino listens to the tapes after the performance. I don’t know if she keeps them or if they’re thrown away. When you’re talking about a negativity that pulls in further negativity, that’s what I think about. The sticking of honey, the pull of Vargas’s voice replicated from recorder to recorder, a year’s worth of tapes sealed into themselves.
TS: We’re interested in the recursion of something. Every repetition calls into question the integrity of the thing that it holds.
SKL: Again, both a paranoid and reparative way of thinking—paranoid because recursive, and reparative because of the want to make good on the integrity of something we might have ruined. Maybe it’s ultimately about the tension between the unconscious idea that we can control the outcome of something by repeating it, and consciously admitting that by repeating it we’re actually relinquishing that control, overcome by repetition.
Maybe that’s the risk of absenteeism. Thinking about the back and forth of Vargas’s voice in her absence makes me think of Wu Tsang’s practice of full-body quotation in her video works Shape of a Right Statement [2008] and For how we perceived a life (Take 3) [2012], which I also write about in the book. She tunes into the frequency of someone else to pick up their speech. I think she understands the practice as a channeling, where her body becomes someone else’s, but I wanted to think about how full-body quotation becomes a possessive act—the speech becomes “Wu Tsang’s” like the books in Y/N became “TJ Shin’s.” Instead of the parentheses of the medium, there’s the quotations that bracket off something or someone else, and aims, in a way, to keep or covet them.
TJ Shin, TJ Shin’s, 2025. Hand-bound artist books. Photograph by Benjamin Westoby.
TS: For Tsang’s work, the idea of speaking for or as someone can only be argued against if someone believes, as you point out in the book, in the full sovereignty of their own articulation. And of course, Trinh T. Minh-ha writes about speaking nearby the other.
SKL: Cathy Park Hong brings up Minh-ha’s idea of speaking nearby when she writes about Tsang in Minor Feelings [Penguin Random House, 2020]. She says that Tsang’s film WILDNESS [2012]— about the Silver Platter, a gay bar in LA near MacArthur Park and its predominantly trans Latina clientele—doesn’t speak nearby but speaks too close and therefore is appropriative. But I’m interested in the too-close! In how Tsang aggresses in order to get closer to another person and how that presents a conflict worth attending to rather than promising to mitigate or avoid.
TS: It brings up to me this idea of what can be verified as true and what can only be substantiated as a self-referential statement, to which I would argue it’s impossible to differentiate unless we are thinking: Who is making that judgment? Who are we persuading, to whom are we speaking with and against, and for?
SKL: It also presumes that a statement can be contained in a particular way and move from one place to the other in some correct, whole, undamaged form, and I feel like you’re interested in, again, the noise—how does that message or speech act degrade or shift or morph in some way, as a part of the medium itself.
TS: I was just reading Gilles Deleuze’s Dialogues, where he describes that when being asked a question, even one directly about his work, he responds with, “I don’t have anything to say.” And I find that response deeply generative, because it suggests that thought emerges through a shared conversational or communicational act, what he describes as a line of flight. The other conversant is always displacing your past ideas, and that past idea is also indebted to another host of past ideas. You talk about the figure of the host in your chapter on Wu Tsang in that way too, which I thought was so interesting, also analogous to, perhaps the way I’m thinking about the conduit.
SKL: “I don’t have anything to say” is funny because so far I’ve done one event around my book, and I think I choked and didn’t have anything insightful to say. It was like my impoverished answers, my failure to reproduce the ideas in the book in real time, in front of other people, ruined the book rather than made it more clear or exciting in any way. I felt like a disappointment. It didn’t assert me as the author so much as it displaced me. Maybe that was my own resistance to presence. I prefer to be a disappointment in my absence, instead. Absenteeism!
TS: Right, like you’re being asked to speak on the book mimetically. A lot of things happen for me in retrospect, where I begin to sense the shape of what happened, the form of agreement or recognition. And it’s interesting to then make work about that moment, to revisit it as if it’s the first encounter and re-present it. In revisiting, you take it apart again. You disassemble its signs, and its mode of signification, come up against your limits and senselessness, and then you wait to do it again. The repetition of that.
SKL: And it’s endless, the noise of it.
