Christine Sun Kim
CAG Façade and Yaletown-Roundhouse Station
Christine Sun Kim, Echoes Sliding Down (detail), 2022. Photo: Rachel Topham Photography.
For more than ten years now, Christine Sun Kim has been engaged expansively with the ways sound is understood, experienced and valued. Upending the notion of the sonic as a solely auditory occurrence, the California-born, Berlin-based artist foregrounds sound’s visual, spatial and political properties across a variety of mediums including drawing, video, performance, and installation. Exploring and employing elements of American Sign Language (ASL) — the artist’s first language — alongside other visual communication systems such as musical notation, infographics and memes, the formal vocabulary of Kim’s work is a singular one, engaging with critical precision and deadpan humour the politics of language, listening and voice.
Following her fall 2022 exhibition, Oh Me Oh My, two of Kim’s public-facing projects remain on view this season. On the facade of CAG, the artist presents Echoes Sliding Down, a work that builds on Kim’s engagement with the echo as a metaphor for Deaf/hearing communication, in which messages are bounced between parties and languages with inevitable reverberations, distortions and delays. At Yaletown-Roundhouse Station, Kim exhibits Debt Debt Debt, ten large-scale line drawings of hands, each referencing the ASL sign for “debt,” “owe” or “afford” to reflect on cycles of owing and borrowing, social, historical and financial alike.
Christine Sun Kim: Debt Debt Debt is presented in partnership with the Canada Line Public Art Program — InTransit BC.
Biography
Christine Sun Kim (b. 1980, California) has exhibited and performed internationally, including at Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Whitney Museum, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; De Appel Arts Center, Amsterdam; the Berlin Biennale; the Shanghai Biennale; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, among many others. Kim was awarded an inaugural Disability Futures Fellowship by the Ford Foundation as well as an MIT Media Lab Fellowship and a TED Senior Fellowship. She lives and works in Berlin.
