Christine Sun Kim
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Christine Sun Kim (born 1980) is an American sound artist, performer and activist based in
Berlin Berlin ( ; ) is the Capital of Germany, capital and largest city of Germany, by both area and List of cities in Germany by population, population. With 3.7 million inhabitants, it has the List of cities in the European Union by population withi ...
. Working predominantly in drawing, performance, and video, Kim's art practice considers how sound operates in society.
Musical notation Musical notation is any system used to visually represent music. Systems of notation generally represent the elements of a piece of music that are considered important for its performance in the context of a given musical tradition. The proce ...
, written language,
American Sign Language American Sign Language (ASL) is a natural language that serves as the predominant sign language of Deaf communities in the United States and most of Anglophone Canadians, Anglophone Canada. ASL is a complete and organized visual language that i ...
(ASL), and the use of the body are all recurring elements in her work. Her work has been exhibited in major cultural institutions internationally, including in the
Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street (Manhattan), 53rd Street between Fifth Avenue, Fifth and Sixth Avenues. MoMA's collection spans the late 19th century to the present, a ...
's first exhibition about sound in 2013 and the
Whitney Biennial The Whitney Biennial is a biennial exhibition of contemporary American art organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. The event began as an annual exhibition in 1932; the first biennial was held in 1973. It is considered ...
in 2019. She was named a TED Fellow in both 2013 and 2015, a Director's Fellow at
MIT Media Lab The MIT Media Lab is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, growing out of MIT's Architecture Machine Group in the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fi ...
in 2015, and a
Ford Foundation The Ford Foundation is an American private foundation with the stated goal of advancing human welfare. Created in 1936 by Edsel Ford and his father Henry Ford, it was originally funded by a $25,000 (about $550,000 in 2023) gift from Edsel Ford. ...
Disability Futures Fellow in 2020.


Background, education, and early career

Christine Sun Kim was born in 1980 and raised in Southern California with hearing parents and a deaf sister. Her first language is
American Sign Language American Sign Language (ASL) is a natural language that serves as the predominant sign language of Deaf communities in the United States and most of Anglophone Canadians, Anglophone Canada. ASL is a complete and organized visual language that i ...
. She has been profoundly deaf since birth. She attended University High School in
Irvine, California Irvine () is a Planned community, planned city in central Orange County, California, United States, in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. It was named in 1888 for the landowner James Irvine. The Irvine Company started developing the area in the ...
, and graduated from
Rochester Institute of Technology The Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) is a private university, private research university in Henrietta, New York, a suburb of Rochester, New York, Rochester. It was founded in 1829. It is one of only two institute of technology, institut ...
in 2002 with a degree in Interdisciplinary Studies. Kim originally wanted to study graphic design but was told that there weren't interpreters for the studio art courses and she would have to attend classes which already included Deaf students. Only later, was Kim able to attend masters programs which allowed her to explore art. She received a
Master of Fine Arts A Master of Fine Arts (MFA or M.F.A.) is a terminal degree in fine arts, including visual arts, creative writing, graphic design, photography, filmmaking, dance, theatre, other performing arts and in some cases, theatre management or arts admi ...
in Visual Art from the
School of Visual Arts The School of Visual Arts New York City (SVA NYC) is a private for-profit art school in New York City. It was founded in 1947 and is a member of the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design. History This school was started by Silas ...
in New York in 2006, and later completed another MFA in Sound and Music from
Bard College Bard College is a private college, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. The campus overlooks the Hudson River and Catskill Mountains within the Hudson River Historic District ...
in 2013. In addition, Kim worked at the Whitney Museum from 2008 to 2014. While there, she established "Deaf-led programs and resources" for Deaf museum visitors.


Work

Kim's artwork is multidisciplinary and includes "drawings, videos, installations and performances." Kim investigates the operations of sound and various aspects of
Deaf culture Deaf culture is the set of social beliefs, behaviors, art, literary traditions, history, values, and shared institutions of communities that are influenced by deafness and which use sign languages as the main means of communication. When used as ...
in her performances, videos, and drawings. In developing her personal visual language, Kim draws from a variety of information systems. She uses elements from these systems such as body language, American Sign Language (ASL), musical and graphic notation, and language interpretation, inventing new structures for her compositions and extending each source's scope of communication. She further uses sound to explore her own relationship to verbal languages and her environment. Through her work, she gains control of voice and sound, seeking to release them from social conventions.


''Close Readings''

Christine Sun Kim first experimented working with video in 2015 with her work ''Close Readings''. The work explores
closed captioning Closed captioning (CC) is the process of displaying text on a television, video screen, or other visual display to provide additional or interpretive information, where the viewer is given the choice of whether the text is displayed. Closed cap ...
and how the choices made affect the experience of watching. Kim had four of her deaf friends recreate scenes from ''The Addams Family'', ''Ghost'', and ''The Little Mermaid'' by reading only the subtitles. The work reverses the traditional power dynamic between auditory media and Deaf audience by obscuring the upper half of the image, forcing a hearing audience to instead rely on the Deaf provided captions.


''The Sound of''

Kim uses sound to explore her feelings in a unique way, as writer Molly Hannon addresses. Kim's series of drawing, "The Sound of," was exhibited at Rubin Museum of Art. "It all goes back to my experience watching the film, ''Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter.''" said Kim. Even though there was not much dialogue, she was fascinated by how detailed and descriptive the captions of the movie were. She started to wonder if she was able to portray the sound of intangible objects like emotions or senses. This has become the essential reason she created this series. She takes traditional music dynamics and refashions them into music notes. In one of her drawings, ''The Sound of Obsessing,'' Kim uses the symbol "p" to represent the sound of piano and indicate the note is played quietly. As more "p" appears, the notes are played more quietly. Kim concretizes abstract ideas. She believes that obsession has a repetitive pattern and can take up a person's mind. She illustrates this pattern with the "p"s. "As time goes on, the obsession quickens, represented by the shrinking distance of p's. Finally, at the end, the p's are crowded and your mind is racing non-stop. You become totally engrossed with your obsession."


''Degrees of Deaf Rage''

In 2018, Christine Sun Kim created a collection of six charcoal drawings on paper that explore "navigating the hearing world as a deaf person" shown in her series titled ''Degrees of Deaf Rage''. The drawings depict various degrees of angles (acute rage, legit rage, obtuse rage, straight up rage, reflex rage, full on rage), each labeled with rage-inducing experiences Kim experiences as a
Deaf Deafness has varying definitions in cultural and medical contexts. In medical contexts, the meaning of deafness is hearing loss that precludes a person from understanding spoken language, an audiological condition. In this context it is written ...
person. She states, "Deaf rage is a real thing. In the Deaf community, it's something we know so well because we've all gone through it." She hopes to "communicate to a wider audience who are not deaf" and are unfamiliar with her culture, as Deaf people are a cultural entity and not just a group of isolated people who have impaired hearing. Kim uses familiar and relatable formats in ''Degrees of Deaf Rage'' so that her "deaf ideas" are easily understandable and accessible to hearing individuals as she explains, "It's like mathematical angles. How much rage do I have? You can see it in that size of the angle". ''Deaf Rage'' was shown in 2019 at the Whitney Biennial, until Kim, along with seven other participants, withdrew her work as a protest against a board member's ties to tear gas used at the Mexican-US border against migrants. The board member, Warren Kanders, resigned as a result of this and other protests.


Notable performances

In 2015, she presented a
TED Talk TED Conferences, LLC (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an American-Canadian non-profit media organization that posts international talks online for free distribution under the slogan "Ideas Change Everything" (previously "Ideas Worth Sprea ...
at a TED fellows retreat focusing on her relationship to sound, and how she has come to discover similarities between
American Sign Language American Sign Language (ASL) is a natural language that serves as the predominant sign language of Deaf communities in the United States and most of Anglophone Canadians, Anglophone Canada. ASL is a complete and organized visual language that i ...
and music. She discussed how she felt that sound does not have to be solely experienced through auditory means. In 2020, she performed at
Super Bowl LIV Super Bowl LIV was an American football game played to determine the champion of the National Football League (NFL) for the 2019 NFL season, 2019 season. The American Football Conference (AFC) champion 2019 Kansas City Chiefs season, Kansas City ...
signing the American national anthem. This began an annual partnership between the
National Football League The National Football League (NFL) is a Professional gridiron football, professional American football league in the United States. Composed of 32 teams, it is divided equally between the American Football Conference (AFC) and the National ...
(NFL) and the National Association of the Deaf (NAD). She later penned an
op-ed An op-ed, short for "opposite the editorial page," is a type of written prose commonly found in newspapers, magazines, and online publications. They usually represent a writer's strong and focused opinion on an issue of relevance to a targeted a ...
in ''
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'' criticizing
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for cutting away during her American Sign Language performances of "
America the Beautiful "America the Beautiful" is an American patriotic song. Its lyrics were written by Katharine Lee Bates and its music was composed by church organist and choirmaster Samuel A. Ward at Grace Church (Newark), Grace Episcopal Church in Newark, New ...
" and the national anthem.


Exhibitions


Solo exhibitions, performances and projects

* Calibration Room and Bounce House,
University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public university, public research university in Austin, Texas, United States. Founded in 1883, it is the flagship institution of the University of Texas System. With 53,082 stud ...
Visual Arts Center, 2015 * Nap Disturbance, performance, Frieze London, 2016 * Face Value, workshop,
Tate Modern Tate Modern is an art gallery in London, housing the United Kingdom's national collection of international Modern art, modern and contemporary art (created from or after 1900). It forms part of the Tate group together with Tate Britain, Tate Live ...
, London, 2016 * (LISTEN), A sound walk by Christine Sun Kim, organized by Avant.org, New York City, 2016 * Lautplan, Kammer Klang, Cafe Oto, London, UK, 2017 * Busy Days, De Appel Arts Centre, Amsterdam, NL, 2017 * Sound Diet and Lullabies for Roux, White Space Beijing booth, Art Basel, CH, 2018 * Too Much Future, Public Art Installation,
Whitney Museum The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is a Modern art, modern and Contemporary art, contemporary American art museum located in the Meatpacking District, Manhattan, Meatpacking District and West Village neighbor ...
, NY, USA, 2018 * Five Finger Discount History, Whitney Museum, NY, USA, 2018 * With a Capital D, White Space, Beijing, CN, 2018-19 * Finish Forever, Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles, USA, 2018-19 * ‘To Point a Naked Finger': Christine Sun Kim & Thomas Mader, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 2019 * Music Box + Smithsonian APA, New Orleans, LA, USA, 2019 * Spoken on My Behalf, Brown Arts Initiative, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA, 2019 * Five Finger Discount History,
Smithsonian American Art Museum The Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM; formerly the National Museum of American Art) is a museum in Washington, D.C., part of the Smithsonian Institution. Together with its branch museum, the Renwick Gallery, SAAM holds one of the world's lar ...
, DC, USA, 2024


Group exhibitions

* The World is Sound, Rubin Museum, New York, NY, USA, 2017 * Soundtracks, SF Museum of Modern Art, CA, USA, 2017 *Resonant Spaces, Hood Museum,
Dartmouth College Dartmouth College ( ) is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Hanover, New Hampshire, United States. Established in 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock, Dartmouth is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the America ...
, NH, USA, 2017 * Serralves Collection: New Lines, Images, Objects, Serralves Museum, Porto, PT, 2018 * For the Record, ifa gallery, Berlin, DE * Paulo Cunha e Silva Art Prize, Galeria Municipal do Porto, Porto, PT, 2018 * What We Make, Ross Art Museum, Delaware, OH, USA, 2018 * 50 State Initiative, For Freedoms, Jefferson City, MO and Des Moines, IA, USA, 2018 * Louder Than Words, Zuckerman Museum of Art, Kennesaw, GA, USA, 2019 * Whitney Biennial 2019, Whitney Museum, NY, USA, 2019 * Resonance: A Sound Art Marathon,
Walker Art Center The Walker Art Center is a multidisciplinary contemporary art center in the Lowry Hill, Minneapolis, Lowry Hill neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. The Walker is one of the most-visited modern and contemporary art museums in ...
, Minneapolis, MN, USA


Personal life

Kim is married to German artist Thomas Mader. The couple have two children.


References


External links

*
"The enchanting music of sign language" talk given at TED Fellows Retreat 2015
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kim, Christine Sun Living people Deaf artists American sound artists Rochester Institute of Technology alumni School of Visual Arts alumni Bard College alumni American deaf people Artists from California 1980 births Women sound artists People from Orange County, California 21st-century American artists 21st-century American women artists American artists of Korean descent American artists with disabilities