ART-PRESENTATION: Christine Sun Kim-Off The Charts
At what point does noise become sound? And what is the relationship between spoken language and our aural environments? Christine Sun Kim, a Berlin-based artist whose first language is American Sign Language (ASL), has developed a unique visual language, employing drawing, painting, and performance, as well as elements from various information systems, to examine these questions
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: MIT List Visual Arts Center
Born deaf in California to Korean parents in 1980, Christine Sun Kim, who currently divides her time between Berlin and New York, is a force to be reckoned with. The decision to work with sound might seem a self-defeating one for someone with restricted access to her chosen media. But this is precisely Kim’s point. Deaf people, she says, “are told that sound is not for them; but sound is not just experienced through ears, it is felt through vibrations in the body and also, as she has put it, as a “ghost”, something she knows is there, going on, even if she doesn’t know quite what it is. By combining aspects of graphic and musical notation, body language, and ASL, Christine Sun Kim uses these systems as a means to expand what each is able to communicate and to invent a new grammar and structure for her compositions. Christine Sun Kim conceives of sound as both a series of conceptual relationships and a form of social currency. Drawing has become a key mode through which she parses these dynamics. Economic, deadpan compositions, her drawings are usually executed in black charcoal. They borrow variously from the structure of musical notation, dynamics, and data visualizations, often representing the spatial and formal qualities of American Sign Language, her first language. In her solo exhibition “Off The Charts” many of her drawings, including “The Sound of Obsessing” (2017) reconfigured as a large-scale mural in the adjacent MIT Media Lab atrium, adopt the symbols P and F. In sheet music, these respectively indicate the relational musical dynamics of piano, or soft playing and forte, or loud playing—to convey Kim’s diagrammatic interpretations of affective states and emotions in sound. A recent group of charcoal drawings transpose scalar representations of volume with graphic representations of the artist’s frustration. Loosely based on sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois’s “Data Portraits”, a series of infographics made in 1900 with statistical data demonstrating the unequitable position of African American populations across the US, Kim’s hand-drawn graphs chart degrees of what she calls “Deaf Rage” vis-à-vis scenarios privileging the needs of hearing individuals. At the List Center, the artist presents a group of twelve recent and new drawings, including a related series that breaks down the various factors involved in a number of personal decisions (“Why I Do Not Read Lips,” “Why I Work with Sign Language Interpreters”) by relative importance in pie chart form. Simultaneously funny and profound, the works pivot on the absurdity of capturing complex choices and their cultural, social, and historical underpinnings in diagrammatic shorthand. The exhibition also includes Kim’s audio installation “One Week of Lullabies for Roux” (2018). For this seven-channel sound work, the artist commissioned a group of friends to create alternative lullabies for her daughter, Roux. Adhering to a set of governing principles including instructions to focus on low frequencies and omit speech or lyrics, these compositions serve to vary what Kim has termed the “sound diet” for her child, raised trilingually in ASL, German Sign Language (DGS), and German, and to place equal weight on all three in a culture that tends to ascribe lesser relevance to signed communication.
Info: Curator: Henriette Huldisch, MIT List Visual Arts Center, 20 Ames Street, Bldg. E15, Atrium level, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Duration: 7/2-12/4/20, Days & Hours: tue-Wed & Fri-sun 12:00-18:00, Thu 12:00-20:00, https://listart.mit.edu
