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Paper short abstract

Following autistic artist Jin Li’s humming and praise songs through Korean churches and disability arts spaces, this paper shows how sensory vocal practices unsettle norms of cleanliness, cure, and intelligibility, revealing disability as a world-making mode of communication.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how autistic artist Jin Li’s humming, singing, and tactile practices reconfigure communicative norms within contemporary Korean Christian and disability institutions. Drawing on an ethnographic documentary project, The Cat that Lives in Your Dreams, and writing on modernization, cleanliness, and Christianity in Korea, the paper traces how Jin Li’s favorite praise songs, repetitive humming, and onomatopoeic phrases operate as a communicative repertoire that exceeds both clinical descriptions of “atypical” language and church idioms of cure, purity, and moral uplift.​

Fieldwork at a Seoul rehabilitation center and a megachurch disability ministry shows how her vocalizations are alternately celebrated as evidence of spiritual joy, treated as “noise” to be managed, or ignored in favor of more legible linguistic forms. In contrast, in New York spaces such as YAI Arts and Positive Exposure, the same humming and singing become recognized as part of Jin Li’s artistic process, shaping how she paints, encounters others, and moves through urban environments. These shifting framings reveal how sensory difference is calibrated against competing regimes of cleanliness, productivity, and religiosity tied to Korean modernization.​

By following a single autistic artist’s sounds across prayer rooms, studios, and streets, the paper argues that vocalization, gesture, and repetition are not merely symptomatic but world-making practices that generate distinct genres of wellbeing and relation. It shows how communicative “frictions” around humming and song become sites where autonomy, dependence, and spiritual worth are negotiated, illuminating how disability reshapes what counts as credible, intelligible communication in polarized medical, religious, and artistic ecologies.