Christine Sun Kim

Drawings, videos and murals center the experience of the Deaf community in an auditory world

In this monograph, the groundbreaking work of the American-born, Berlin-based artist Christine Sun Kim (born 1980) is explored through essays, short texts and reflections, an interview and abundant large-scale images of Kim's work. An artist who foregrounds the visual, physical and political dimension of sound, Kim challenges the notion that sound is solely an auditory experience. Kim, whose first language is American Sign Language (ASL), uses elements from various information systems, such as musical notation, infographics and ASL, to develop a dryly humorous visual vocabulary in a variety of mediums, including performance, drawing, video, lectures and more. She aims to draw attention to the power imbalances between the hearing world and the Deaf community, as well as to celebrate the generative possibilities and creative energy that can arise from interactions between people with different positionalities and modes of communication.