Christine Sun Kim is an artist whose work focuses on sound, and sometimes its absence, positing intriguing explorations of art through music, linguistics, drawing, and performance. Her body of work is as impressive as it is wondrously varied and powerful. A magnificently minimalist website offers glimpses into her work and career, as encapsulated in the excerpt below. Her passionate search for the myriad ways in which we communicate is one of the most important journeys ever made by a Dazzler of the Day.
In her work, Berlin-based artist Christine Sun Kim, whose first language is American Sign Language (ASL), approaches the concept of sound via deconstructive exercises, experiments, and observations through drawing, painting, and performance. Over the course of developing her own visual language, Kim explores and employs elements from various information systems. By combining aspects of graphic and musical notation, body language, and ASL, she uses these systems as a means to expand what each is able to communicate and to invent a new grammar and structure structure for her compositions.
Performance is also part of Kim’s practice, often providing the starting point for works on paper that display witty evocations of both sounds and signs. She highlights what is constantly present and yet unnamed by us all through naming and then deconstructing preconceived ideas about sound and communication through their parameters, social values, and linguistics. Moreover, Kim works within and around the nuances of sound: at what point does noise become sound? When is something appropriate, and whose job is it to determine the agreeability of a sound, a noise, and their ensuing respectability or social capital?
Christine Sun Kim (b. 1980, California) received a Master of Fine Arts in Music / Sound from Bard College in 2013. She has exhibited and performed internationally, including at the Whitney Museum, New York (2018); Art Institute of Chicago (2018); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2017); De Appel Arts Center, Amsterdam (2017); Rubin Museum of Art, New York (2017); Berlin Biennale (2016); Shanghai Biennale (2016); Sound Live Tokyo (2015, 2013); MoMA PS1, New York (2015) and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013). Kim was awarded a MIT Media Lab Fellowship and a TED Senior Fellowship and has presented at numerous conferences and symposia. She lives and works in Berlin.
