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BIO

Ben Kim Paplham was born in Busan, South Korea, and adopted into the wild zoo that is De Pere, WI. Their adopted family, the Paplham Clan, raised Ben Kim on animated movies, LOTR, and the sound of lawnmowers at 5 in the morning. Today, Ben Kim is an artist, performer, and educator currently pursuing their MFA in Writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They are also a harborer of DnD chaos, a spicy chicken kind of dude, an Oscars ballot champion, and a stand-up comic for an audience of themself.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I think of storytelling as the art of healing. We don’t have a quantifiable measure for how art strengthens emotional and mental health, but we know that it must, or we wouldn’t feel the compulsion to tell story or consume it.

But what is story? I define it as the telling of something that has happened or could happen. This is self-obvious in a story that is based in memoir or documentation, but even in fiction — whether it’s a fantasy universe or an aggrandized biographical drama — the power of imagined narrative is its ability to strike at an emotional resonance, some truth about the nature of humanity or the world that we can only express with art.

The idea of story is shapeless. And by that, I mean that story is not contained to a specific form — it can be fictionalized or documented, as candid as an embellished anecdote you tell to a friend or a complex as a decade-long television program. What’s exciting about the infinite possibility of story is discovering that form that best maximizes its message, what it wants to communicate to the audience. In my poetic form, for example, I think of the white page as a sort of theatrical stage for language, so when I compose poems, I work at matching the visual appearance of letter and words to their semantic or thematic meaning.

With that being said, I am an advocate for the creation of stories from individuals and groups of people who have, historically, not been listened to. I am a big believer that media representation is a fundamental need for mental and emotional health because it is a form of validating the “I” or “me” as an individual who is also a wide intersection of various social communities. I have the unusual intersection of being an adopted, disabled, queer, Korean-American; thus, I am always craving art that allows those varying discrete and connecting identities to not only exist…but thrive. And what I cannot find, I try to create myself.

EXCERPT FROM YOU’LL UNDERSTAND WHEN YOU’RE OLDER

Someone recently asked me why I feel the need to explain to other people that I am physically disabled. And the tone of her genuine curiosity and care cannot be conveyed accurately in writing, but nevertheless, even now, as I sit at my desk, soda and candy at hand to get me through the night, I struggle with a proper response. 

And it’s not because this issue is an emotional trigger — not like it would have been five years ago, which is perhaps the best measurement of personal growth — it’s because when I am faced with a question that, within the answer, compels me to want to somehow, in its totality, express the paradoxical relationship with disability: 

See, what I’ve grown to understand about myself is that disability are those last droplets breaking the dam, the feather on Osiris’ scale. Because if I wasn’t disabled, I would still have to face the aggravations of humankind: love, betrayal, shame, anger, fear, hurt, ambition, anxiety, pride, doubt, envy, and maybe a dust of peace. But it was in the way my brace squeaked at every step, at needing help to climb inside my family’s suburban, that I knew life expected something different from me.

And god or gods or cosmic bodies knows that I am praying that expectation is not simply to be an inspiration, a guiding light, for those who want to feel uplifted. It’s one thing to know me personally or receive my art, and quite another to look at my body and feel your generosity of spirit renewed. 

Which also encompasses comments, internal or external, about my positive attitude in life, in reference, of course, to the assumed difficulty of my disabled existence. Although I may present a generally favorable, some may even say personable, disposition,  make no mistake — inside, I am harboring a fugitive, a lurking demon possessed by pride, egotism, arrogance, and an unhealthy competition for a legacy that outlives their body. I’m very Roman, in that sense.

The same people who can’t recognize when they’ve made the disabled community swallow their trauma are the same people who can’t recognize a customer service smile when they see one. For us, a smile is survival. Or maybe it’s just me. But my disability has placed me in powerless, helpless, humbling positions where my ability to make it to the next part of my day is dependent on the kindness of a stranger — and who wants to help someone who is cranky, bitter, or hostile? This could be at a grocery store, not being able to reach an item on a taller shelf and no employee in sight, or on the L in Chicago, asking someone to give up their seat, even though everyone in this situation is tired and wanting to be left alone, because I’m afraid of that the pain sensors in my knee are telling me it’s about to collapse. It might not. But that uncertainty — projecting my body’s health in the next minute, next hour, next day — is an impossibility that I am constantly calculating in my mind. 

That mental exhaustion sometimes means a smile is simply a defense mechanism, nature ensuring its own survival. Sometimes it’s genuine joy — despite my terrible proclivity for self deprecation, I am somewhat known for my sense of humor that can only be described as the shit-eating bravado of someone who grew up knowing only a very bold person is going to put the disabled kid on blast. 

Sometimes, though, a smile has to be the default answer. Why do you feel the need to tell people that you’re disabled? Unfortunately, I don’t always have the time to craft the answer that feels right to me. So a smile will have to do.

Maybe, though, that’s why I’ve always been drawn to academia and writing. Because when it comes to words and language, the shape of sounds on paper, the way words are just guided images — the only limit is my curiosity. It’s an equalizer. The way Zoom classes during the pandemic became an unexpected equalizer. The energy I had spent in semesters past — grocery stores and trains and elevators and stairs and office doors and backpacks and countertops and cracked sidewalks and city noise and crowds and wide puddles and the bigness of life — simplified to me. My computer. A schedule I could actually wake up knowing what to expect. Not having to walk everywhere. (And I don’t have to go into a student’s finances to explain why ride service options had to be conservatively bargained.)

It was during these pandemic classes that I also realized this startling fact: anyone who had never seen me didn’t know I was disabled. From the waist up, unless I waved my left arm around (revealing the lack of a hand there), there was no way to guess whether I was 4 feet or 8. I could be anyone, and it made me strangely giddy — the absurdity of my existence felt like a secret; for the first time, the power to disclose my disabilities was in my control. I had an agency in my life that I have never felt before, but I also realized something else, equally as startling: 

Despite the impossibility of understanding what disability means to me, a lifetime of minute successes, failures, disappointments, and resolve… It felt like a lie.

To interact with my peers, hold conversation, and develop a friendship… it wasn’t right. Because disability isn’t just my body. It’s my voice. 

So, in answer to that classmate, a pandemic classroom apart, wanting to know about what it’s like to be disabled, this is the answer I meant to say.