In the summer of 2008, California native Christine Sun Kim— a painter who has been deaf since birth — spent a month living in Berlin on an artist residency. While visiting local galleries, she encountered spaces that were devoid of objects, but filled with sound installations; having never before encountered audio installations, Sun Kim understandably found them dissatisfying. Initially, Sun Kim did not know how to interact with the sound works, but she applied for several grants and was able to hire a tutor and purchase speakers, amplifiers, and other equipment to begin her study of the sense that had remained inaccessable to her throughout her life.
For her first audio works, Sun Kim created visual and physical representations of soundwaves by placing paint-dipped brushes on paper on top of subwoofers. She then made noises with paper, drumheads, amd other materials which made the subwoofers vibrate, causing the brushes to move around on the paper and thereby creating abstract designs. “When I started employing sound as the medium of my work, the first obvious step was to work with vibrations. However, after producing a few series of speaker drawings, my curiosity quickly disappeared and I recognized the great degree of social currency surrounding sound,” Sun Kim explained recently. “It was no longer about the simple translation from intangible/inaccessible sound to visual/tangible medium.”
These studies of the visual side of the aural world therefore led to her current practice, which includes performances, lectures, and installations exploring the social roles of sound and the limits and limited nature of spoken language. Much of her work is interactive. In the public performance, “Face Opera: Nuances of Language,” she created a silent opera-based performace where the score was expressed entirely through a choir's facial expressions. “People often rely on hearing to obtain information, so I used the opera format to show the visual and grammatical aspects of American Sign Language (ASL) and how most of its content is conveyed through the face. It is a way for me to examine non signers’ language preferences and to encourage them to 'hear' by looking at those choir singers’ moving faces,” Sun Kim explained.
In addition to being selected as a speaker at Creative Summit in Sweden this summer and a 2013 TED Fellow, Sun Kim has a part in an upcoming show at MoMA in New York and a performance at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Winnipeg. For her part in the group show at MoMA, Sun Kim will show works created as part of her “Scores and Transcripts” series, for which she created graphic works that combine elements from written language, musical notation, and ASL to challenge the way we think of communication.
Perhaps it is because Sun Kim has been forced to approach sound on her own, self-constructed terms — rather than take it for granted — that she is able to access so many rarely examined and layered complexities of the aural experience.
To see works by Christine Sun Kim, click on the slideshow.