When did you decide that you wanted to make art?
Way back as long as I can remember! My grandmother was a painter and my dad is not an artist but I’ve seen him do amazing drawings at the drop of a hat. In 2nd grade all the students in my class had to draw the birds we were studying and I remember being really proud of mine, I think I realized then that I excelled at art. Whenever an assignment had the potential for visual presentation, I knew I had it. So it’s one of those few things I’ve always felt confident and technically proficient about. I never wanted to be anything but an artist. My sketchbook was my lifesaver in high school. I could always escape in it. You can just forget about stuff and lose yourself in a drawing.

How did you get started? 
My mom would put me in after school and summer session art classes at CCA in Oakland, CA as a kid, (thanks mama!). I started out drawing and painting. After graduating from high school I took some classes at the Academy of Art in S.F., but that was a pretty distracting time for me, LOL! Eventually, I wound up in Hawai‘i and finally ended up with my BFA in photography from UH. I inadvertently stumbled into photography when I bought a nice 35mm camera and decided to enroll in a photo class so I could learn to use it. I loved working in the darkroom. It was my professor Mark Hamasaki who encouraged me to pursue photography further and suggested the possibility of actually showing my work.

Your recent “Erotic Mirages” series reflects your background in those mediums. It’s tricky for the viewer to identify the pieces as drawings? Photographs? What processes do you use to create the images?
My visual jump off point was the silhouette. So I got a stack of old porno mags and did contour drawings of the female figures. I scanned the drawings and used them as templates, which I filled in with various elements. I included photographic sources from the massive image bank I’ve acquired over the years shooting at a gentlemen’s club in Honolulu. I also scanned the fabrics of the exotic dancer’s costumes to incorporate texture and color and used images appropriated from the web. So I used all these visual elements to make digital montages within the frame of the female figure. They are archival inkjets printed on heavy fine art paper.

Can you tell us about the themes in your work and how that came about?
I’ve always loved figurative work, been intensely attracted to the female form and my favorite subjects have remained in the social periphery. My work started to really develop in 2004 when I started shooting portraits of exotic dancers. I shot on location and was interested in the sense of place in the locker room and granting visual access to a place that most people don’t see. Following that body of work, I brought girls into the studio to do a series of diptychs using a technique of light painting that dealt with the dual nature of an exotic dancer’s identity. “Erotic Mirages” came about as part of my BFA seminar. The project is informed by a world where truth and fantasy exists as overlapping conditions. I was interested in how the girls in this world construct and project an identity and in how that identity is then perceived by the viewer. The mirage, like the fantasy of the erotic female, is the projection of an impossible promise. Once you get close enough you begin to see how unattainable the subject really is. I wanted to handle the work in an ambiguous, abstracted fashion and create a metaphor for layers of truth, actuality, and the theatrics of fantasy.

When people see your work there is always a visible and/or audible reaction. What is it that you want the viewer to take away from your pieces?
The nude or exotic female form draws in the viewer, and has throughout history. I really want to encourage the viewer to take a closer look. They think they know what they’re looking at when they approach the crisp silhouette of a sexy chick but the closer they look their expectations are broken. I hope to expose subtle indications as to the true nature of the subject and kind of shake up the projected illusion. I want the viewer to make discoveries through their observations that delight, disturb, or surprise them.

Also, what was most rewarding about showing your work?
This was the first show I’ve participated in where I didn’t get completely emo and start balling. The reaction was awesome! I was really surprised and it felt amazing. The best part was having all the dancers come out and support me. Some of the girls had never been into a gallery before and it felt good to have them all know that my work wouldn’t have been possible without them as my inspiration.

Will you continue working with your muses? Where do you want to take your art?
I still shoot in the club and work with all the girls. I’m super fortunate they’ve been so trusting of me and have become really amazing friends. I want to do some life size pieces and continue working with the silhouette on a larger scale to see how far I can develop it. Also, I’ve considered putting together an anthology of images, interviews, and storytelling in a book project of some kind… so many great stories come out of that place! Otherwise I want to just press forward, push myself forward artistically, see how far I can take things and remind myself to be risky!


クリスティン・リム
彼女は、マルチメディアアーティスト、そしてさらに写真家でもある。彼女はその官能的な作品に新しい次元を創り出すため、ポルノ雑誌のシルエットと、イメージや布を合わせる工夫をしている。彼女は女性の身体にとても興味を持っていて、彼女の作品からもそれはうかがえる。