Christine Sun Kim

About Christine's Work

Christine Sun Kim is an artist exploring the political, cultural, and multisensory dimensions of sound, spoken language, and communication. Across a varied body of work that includes drawings, large-scale murals, video, and interactive installations, Kim creates visual and conceptual representations of sound. She engages with the complexities deaf people experience in a world that prioritizes sound and spoken forms of communication.

In the participatory sound-based work Game of Skill 2.0 (2015), Kim foregrounds the labor involved in listening, typically considered a passive mode of engagement. For this installation, an individual must painstakingly maneuver a handheld device to make it emit a spoken word text written by the artist. An arm topped with a magnet extends from the device, and participants must carefully keep it in contact with wires stretched across the gallery as they move through the space. How a participant holds the device, moves, or walks affects how the audio is emitted. Kim’s Degrees of Deaf Rage (2018-2019) series is a candid and humorous accounting of the difficulties deaf people face in scenarios where the ability to hear is taken for granted. The series comprises charcoal and oil pastel drawings of geometric angles that visualize Kim and her deaf friends’ frustration and anger in various institutional settings. An acute angle describes their anger when an Uber driver calls instead of texts, while a right angle indicates their “legit” rage at hotels that use fire alarms without strobe lights. A full circle (360 degrees) represents their “full on rage” when their suitcases are left on a runway after a flight attendant asks for the owner in spoken English only.

Many of Kim’s works include infographics, musical notation, and her own graphic lexicon. The mural Prolonged Echo (2023) features black arching forms against a white background, evoking the American Sign Language (ASL) sign for “echo.” The source material for the drawing is illegible to a viewer unfamiliar with ASL, replicating deaf people’s experience of receiving information in echo form; everything is repeated, with more or less detail. This reflects the fact that deaf people do not have direct access to the source of spoken communication and must rely on intermediaries like sign language or writing. Another large-scale mural, Ghost(ed) Notes (2024), depicts musical notes falling outside of and around four-line staves, indicating rhythm without discernable pitch and prompting reflection on omissions and breakdowns in communication. Kim’s work powerfully conveys the experiences of deaf people and opens up new ways of understanding sound and hearing.