American sound artist Christine Sun Kim was born in Berlin in 1980. Kim’s approach, which mostly consists of painting, performance, and video, takes into account how sound functions in society. American Sign Language (ASL), written language, musical notation, and bodily movement are all reoccurring themes in her work. Major cultural institutions throughout the world have displayed her work, including the Whitney Biennial in 2019 and the Museum of Modern Art’s first sound exhibition in 2013. In addition to being designated a Director’s Fellow at the MIT Media Lab in 2015 and a TED Fellow in 2013 and 2015, she was also named a Ford Foundation Disability Futures Fellow in 2020.
History and education
1980 saw the birth of Christine Sun Kim, who was raised in Southern California by hearing parents and a deaf sister.
Since birth, she has had profound hearing loss. She attended University High School in Irvine, California, and earned an Interdisciplinary Studies degree from Rochester Institute of Technology in 2002. She holds master’s degrees in sound and music from Bard College and visual art from the School of Visual Arts in New York.
Art form
Kim uses performances, movies, and drawings to explore how sound works as well as other facets of Deaf culture. Kim uses a range of information methods to create her own visual language. She incorporates components from each of these systems, including body language, American Sign Language (ASL), musical notation, graphic notation, and language interpretation, creating new compositional structures and broadening the range of communication for each. She also uses sound to investigate how she interacts with her surroundings and speaking languages on a personal level. She attempts to take control of voice and sound through her art in an effort to free them from social constraints.
Outstanding performances
She gave a TED Talk in 2015 on her relationship to sound and how she came to realize that music and American Sign Language share certain parallels at a TED Fellows retreat. She talked about how she believed that hearing is not the only way to experience sound.
As part of what has become an annual collaboration between the National Football League (NFL) and the National Association of the Deaf, she performed at Super Bowl LIV in 2020. (NAD). Later, she wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times in which she criticized Fox Sports for pausing during her American Sign Language renditions of the national anthem and “America the Beautiful.”
Artworks
Close Readings
Sun, Christine With her piece Close Readings from 2015, Kim tried working with video for the first time. By reading only the subtitles, Kim had four of her deaf friends reenact sequences from The Addams Family, Ghost, and The Little Mermaid.
The Sound Of
As author Molly Hannon explains, Kim uses sound in a novel way to examine her emotions. The “The Sound of” drawing series by Kim was on display at the Rubin Museum of Art. It all stems from my viewing of the movie Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter, stated Kim. She was captivated by how thorough and evocative the movie’s captions were despite the lack of any conversation. She began to question her ability to capture the sound of abstract concepts like emotions or senses.
This has come to be the main motivation behind why she started this series. She transforms conventional musical dynamics into musical notes. Kim utilizes the letter “p” to depict the sound of a piano and to denote that a note is being played quietly in one of her artworks, The Sound of Obsessing. The notes are played softer as there are more “p” letters present. Kim makes abstract concepts concrete. She thinks that obsessions have a predictable pattern and can consume a person’s thoughts. She uses the letters “p” to demonstrate this pattern. “As time passes, the preoccupation intensifies, as indicated by the decreasing space between p’s. The p’s are crammed near the end, and your mind is always racing. You lose yourself entirely in your obsession.”
Variations in Deaf Rage
Degrees of Deaf Rage is a series by Christine Sun Kim from 2018 that consists of six charcoal drawings on paper that examine “navigating the hearing world as a deaf person.”
The paintings show anger from different perspectives (acute, legitimate, obtuse, straight-up, reflex, full-on), each identified with rage-inducing events Kim encounters as a Deaf person. She claims, “The emotion of deaf anger exists. We know it so well in the Deaf community because we’ve all experienced it.” Since Deaf people are a cultural group and not just a collection of isolated individuals with hearing loss, she wants to “speak to a wider audience who are not deaf” and are unfamiliar with her culture. In Degrees of Deaf Rage, Kim uses forms that are recognizable and relatable to make her “She says, “It’s like mathematical angles; deaf thoughts are simply intelligible and accessible to hearing people. How enraged am I right now? It is visible at that size and angle “.
FAQs
When was Sun Kim born?
American sound artist Christine Sun Kim was born in Berlin in 1980
Name some famous artworks of Sun Kim.
Close Readings and The Sound Of
