Conversation: Tiger Dingsun
By Chi Siegel
This interview was originally published in sinθ #10 “THRIVE 盛”. Get it now on BLURB.
I first came across Tiger’s work at my own university, at the “Odds and Ends” Art Book Fair held at the Yale University Art Gallery. I was aimlessly paging through the works at the Rhode Island School of Design’s (RISD) booth when I came across “Kill the Police”.
Designed by Tiger, it featured excerpts from news stories about police being arbitrarily called on black people alongside photos of garbage and filth. The efficacy of his almost brutalist take on print design prompted me to seek out his online portfolio, and the quality of his collection of unique and fiercely decolonial works amassed over his brief years of formal design education stunned me. Tiger also helped found Uncommon Sense, a zine that features work that introduces a decolonial or anti-hegemonic lens to the institutions we inhabit.
Born in 1998, Tiger will receive a dual BA/BS degree in Graphic Design at RISD and Computer Science at Brown University in 2020. I had the chance to get on the phone with him in December 2018 to talk about about his unique style, the melding of radical politics and graphic design, and his approach — both aesthetic and personal — to decolonization.
Chi Siegel: Could you start by telling me a little more about your background?
Tiger Dingsun: I was born in the United States but went to most of middle school and high school in China at an international school, because my dad relocated for work. I lived in China for seven years before applying to college, and at the time in high school, I was really into art, but that wasn’t that big of a priority for my family.
This dual degree program between Brown and RISD was the one way I could continue pursuing a creative discipline while also doing something more “marketable” at Brown. That’s actually somewhat of a typical narrative for people in my program as well.
CS: Continuing on that personal note — please do tell me more about the journey that led you to being interested in graphic design.
TD: In high school, I was into graphic design in a weird way, in retrospect. I would listen to these random graphic design podcasts that were almost pragmatic. The podcasts would talk about industry practices and how to send invoices to their clients. I don’t know why I kept listening to those.
CS: Do you have any podcast recommendations for designers?
TD: I keep trying to find good design podcasts. I used to listen to “99% Invisible” a lot. But it feels like it’s more about the narrative of the story now than it is about design. But when I got to RISD for some reason, it felt like I had forgotten about this interest. I was thinking about going into apparel or making clothing. But then I actually took a class during winter session, a month-long [extra] semester where you take one or two courses in the winter, called Experimental Digital Publishing, and that renewed my interest in graphic design. Fundamentally, I’m interested in the way that certain ideas get disseminated in society and in culture via various texts and various media.
CS: How did Uncommon Sense start and how was the first issue generated?
TD: It actually started out of a class I was taking about decolonizing pedagogy. There was an option of doing a creative final project, so I decided to do this instead of writing an essay. My friend [Nadia Wolff] and I are both interested in decolonial thinking. We understand we are still within these [elite] institutions, but we are finding ways to work within those institutions in subversive ways. We also know a lot of friends who are trying to think in this way while making work at RISD, but it seemed like there wasn’t a central place for all that work to exist. That was the main motivation behind creating this publication. From there, we reached out to everyone we knew for them to submit work.
CS: Uncommon Sense’s aim of applying decolonial thinking to institutions comes at a time when students at universities around the world are calling to decolonise the curriculum and for their schools to address the legacies of their donors. Has that played out a lot in your university experiences?
TD: Definitely. I’ve seen this happen more so at RISD just because I’m more involved in the community [here]. But for example, there’s been more calls to first and foremost diversify the faculty and calls for data about demographics to be disseminated. Also, calls for more transparency on where our money is going, because RISD introduced this new “technology fee” that added $800 to everyone’s tuition. That sort of came very unexpectedly and without any sort of explanation.
At Brown there was recently a black student walk-out — on the fiftieth anniversary of a student walk-out in the past — to address issues such as the lack of diverse faculty and the overall inequity in the level of support given. I’ve also seen attention on the state of mental healthcare at both Brown and RISD, and the way that these services aren’t well-targeted for those demographics [of people of color]…
CS: I was wondering then more about that theme. As someone attending an academic institution, and who was first exposed to post-colonialist discourse through academic institutions, it’s hard to not feel like there is a distinction or barricade between “academia” and “reality,” and feel trapped by the former — the discursive spaces of post colonialism (and theory in general) hardly ever escape the bubble of academia or the elitist circles produced by academia — what challenges have you faced in this regard?
TD: That’s something I’m always thinking about as well. Postcolonial theory has already become fully subsumed in the constellation of academic thought. Often, I think about this more so in terms of the graphic design lens. I think “decolonizing design” can get kind of iffy, because it’s not always so clear what people mean by “decolonial.” Because first and foremost, decolonization has to do with land repatriation and settler-colonialism, which is tied to land and resources.
Another thing that I’ve noticed is this renewed celebration of illegibility, in a very literal visual sense, making text literally harder to read as a direct visual metaphor for celebrating cultural illegibility. I think there is a limit to how far visual metaphors can go into expressing anti-hegemonic ideals. It somewhat parallels the academic absorption of radical discourses in visual fields as this aesthetic absorption of “anti-hegemonic aesthetic choices” or something. I don’t know what the answer to all of that is. I guess, to always be vigilant of your aesthetics, whether that comes from your culture or something else, [to keep them] from being totally subsumed.
I always think about the audience for my works. At an institution like RISD or Brown, it can often default to a white, liberal audience. So I have to wonder: how much am I self-orientalizing or pandering by using a certain aesthetic that has cultural ties? At the same time, I should still be allowed to use these aesthetics.
CS: Those are certainly very interesting and pressing questions you’re raising. I’ve also noticed that “romanticization” of illegibility these past few years as a growing trend in design.
How do you think of your time in China, or the relationship you have between the U.S. and China, both of which you spent considerable amounts of time growing up in, changed your identity or influenced your art, if at all?
TD: It has made me think about my identity in a much more vague sense. I don’t identify so strongly with an “Asian-American” identity. I also don’t fully claim “Chinese” identity. That’s partially because going to an international school in China also gives you a certain privilege or distance from fully immersing yourself in China. While I am ethnically Chinese, when I was living in China I was still going to school where I primarily spoke English.
I’m not sure if that really ties into my work. Maybe in a very loose sense, as I’m interested in these in-between spaces that one can exist in that haven’t yet been described or fully canonized as a distinct identity. I do sometimes try to use Chinese typography, but I’m always a little bit cautious in not only using Chinese typography as a purely aesthetic choice.
CS: Following up on that, when do you find yourself consciously choosing to deploy Chinese characters in your artworks? In Generative Books 1 and 2 you use an English translation of the Tao Te Ching, but in the Duchamp work with the Chinese National Anthem it’s entirely in Chinese characters.
TD: I made the Generative Books a long time ago and now I don’t think it’s that good. At the time, I was thinking a lot about this act of translation: how translation can often have very subtle changes in the meaning of the language, and how it could further scramble that language. In that sense that’s why I chose for example to use the English translation of the Tao Te Ching.
For the Chinese National Anthem, I was thinking specifically about the cultural artifact of the anthem, so it wouldn’t make sense to use English. Sometimes I do make work that is more culturally specific, in which case it makes sense to use Chinese.
CS: A super general question: what are the inspirations for your works, broadly?
TD: The two largest threads I have running through my works are race and poetry. So: using poetic language or even indirect or non-fully-expository language to describe experiences with race. My work about race or identity used to become so didactic and so overbearing that it was really hard to engage with. That’s when I started drawing from poetry and poetic language, to use that as a vehicle to slip in racial discourse.
Before, I would fall into this “genre” of making work about identity, but it always seemed five percent disingenuous all the time. Because I was always so aware of this white audience that I knew would, quite frankly, eat this shit up. It’s work about identity, and by engaging with it, you perform how liberal or how inclusive you are in considering this work. Instead, I decided to try and make work that focused on whiteness and the other side of these racialized experiences that I’ve had. Quickly, it became subsumed — when you make work about whiteness, it becomes easily subsumed back into the white, liberal mindset, like being open to self-flagellation as a way to perform how radical you are, or how much of an ally you are. That in itself is super interesting, and I’m becoming more interested in that meta-narrative of creating racially marked work, or work about whiteness and how that is received and by whom and why. Mainly, my goal is to talk about race, how can I make work about race that actually becomes understood in a very deep way and what sort of vehicles could I use that are familiar that I can slip in subversive discourse without people fully realizing at first.
CS: Can you also elaborate how your views on love as radical politics has evolved alongside your work?
TD: I go through cycles of being very angry and then being very forgiving. I’m not sure that I have a full answer for this either. This semester, I’ve leaned more towards the anger, which is valid. Both trying to exert this radical love and being angry are valid ways of reconciling the daily injustices you face.
CS: How would you describe your relationship with material/media? In Milk and Fresh Snow, the project takes on two forms and as a viewer/reader that generates two totally different experience. Why two forms? Are there different messages encoded?
TD: Whenever I choose to make work in a digital form or when I translate something I’ve made into a digital form, it’s almost always for very pragmatic reasons, just in order to make my work more accessible and widen the scope of my audience. I am very intuitively drawn more to print for some reason. Maybe I like the way things look when printed. I do recognize how, with print media now, the range of distribution is so much narrower than if things exist on the web. Holding a print object versus reading something on the screen is very different. One thing that I don’t want my work to be is to seem precious, which is a pitfall that comes from working with print and making things like zines or other print materials that you could conceivably sell at a book fair or something. One aspect of digital work is an advantage is that it seems less precious on the internet. Often in print, when I present a large quantity of text, it’s hard to get people to read it. One strategy that works is presenting things in a time based away, like putting the text to a video makes people more compelled to watch the video and thus read the text for some reason. That’s definitely a way that the reading of a text can work more to my advantage in a digital setting.
CS: Yeah, I saw that video about the encounter in the Portland airport, I Guess I Hate Banter.
TD: That was actually one of my more successful projects, in terms of people engaging with it in a deeper way than I actually wanted.
CS: What was the inspiration behind the creation of the hairties on the ground Instagram (@circleonsquare)?
TD: Oh. [laughs] I started it in the freshman year of college. I noticed them and started taking pictures of them. I had also recently seen similar Instagram accounts that acted as catalogs. There’s one of used wedding dresses — people selling wedding dresses online. There’s another artist who catalogs the reflections of people in mirrors that they’re taking a picture of to sell online. That was a moment in which I was interested in what it would mean to catalog a very banal occurrence. I don’t really update it anymore, but it’s there.
CS: Can graphic design change the world?
TD: [laughs] That was literally the focus of the most recent unit in my main graphic design studio. The conclusion that I tentatively came to was: maybe, but not on its own.
One thing I’ve been thinking about this semester is aestheticization and whether or not that’s a valid strategy for drawing people into radical politics. Sometimes, the most meaningful impact that graphic design can have on policy is by attaching itself to a cause and making it really marketable in order to draw people in. On one level, sounds so depressing, like the only thing graphic design can do is to draw these various causes or grassroots organizations back into the neoliberal logic of the market economy. But on a more pragmatic level, what can graphic design do besides attaching itself to a cause and helping it raise money?
CS: The relationship between aestheticization and trying to engage people in radical politics without de-fanging it is very interesting.
TD: Without seeming disingenuous, yeah.
CS: Got any plans for the near future? New projects or new goals?
TD: I’m working on my graphic design thesis/degree project next semester, which is really exciting. I’m not totally sure what it’s going to look like yet, but I think it’s going to be about genre and how that relates to race and the dissemination of text. For example, I’m interested in tropey or campy genres like westerns or high fantasy and science fiction, and how those can encode colonial anxieties or colonial fantasies. With westerns, that connection is pretty apparent. With scifi, I’m interested in things like Afro-futurism and Asian-futurism and how scifi can encode with utopian and dystopian desires and anxieties that ultimately tie back into race. That’s what I’m thinking about right now.
