Christine Sun Kim
B.C. Binning Gallery, CAG Façade and offsite at Yaletown-Roundhouse Station
Christine Sun Kim, When Grammar Mood, 2020. Courtesy of the artist and François Ghebaly Gallery.
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.
In Oh Me Oh My, Kim brings together a broad selection of recent drawings, along with a new large-scale mural and two public artworks installed on the CAG Façade and at nearby Yaletown-Roundhouse Station. Whether diagramming the structural and cultural underpinnings of seemingly personal decisions, tracing social debts to consider what we owe one another, or mapping the distortions and delays inherent to Deaf/hearing communication, Kim’s works challenge widely held hierarchies that tether voice inextricably to sound, disrupting the implicit authority of the spoken over the signed and the aural over other perceptual planes.
Christine Sun Kim: Oh Me Oh My is co-organized by the Contemporary Art Gallery, Remai Modern, the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College, and the Gund Gallery at Kenyon College.
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.
