Christine Sun Kim 김 크리스틴 선: ARTNOW Interview

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In past interviews, it seemed that your identity as a deaf person, which you have long contemplated, resonated more deeply with you than your Korean American heritage. However, your connection with Korea has been growing recently. We would like to know if these experiences are bringing any new changes or influences to your daily life, working methods, or perspective on identity.

Growing up, I spent so much time trying to be as "deaf" as possible that other aspects of my identity, like being Korean American, didn't get priority until recent years. Now that I'm a parent, I look at my kids and think about how their identities depend on how my partner and I raise them, which has made me conscious of how to pass on what my parents showed me. I hope they come to understand their Koreanness as an important facet of who they are. There might be some missing links, but visiting Seoul more often might be one solution.

Now that I'm an immigrant myself in Berlin, I don't think I've fully realized how much being raised by immigrant parents in the US has shaped me. It's always on my mind, along with my growing desire to get to know the country where my parents and grandparents came from.

These questions about origin and identity have helped me make new work throughout my career. Recently, I made a new exhibition that will debut in my first solo exhibition in Seoul, and I used my anxieties around this challenge to figure out an entirely new body of work: shaped paintings! With these my state of mind has become tangible, palpable, physical. I’m excited to present them in Korea. They’re something between paintings and sculptures.

Before encountering your work, I was also one of many who considered sound to be the exclusive domain of hearing people. When and how did your journey as an artist working with sound begin? Could you share your experience of realizing that the ownership of sound had been claimed by the hearing community, and beginning to reclaim it as your own? I imagine that establishing this inner conviction within yourself, even before facing societal assumptions, may have been a profound process.

It all began in Berlin! I did a short residency there in 2008. I was mentally and physically far from my home city, and my mind started expanding in ways I'd never experienced. That's when I started thinking about sound. Like I said earlier, I was too busy being deaf, so I questioned whether working with sound would make me “less deaf.” It turned out to be the opposite. It took another Master of Fine Arts degree, and a while, to figure out exactly what I wanted to do with sound. I needed to develop the vocabulary before I could think about the grammar. I think I'm in my grammar phase now.

Ultimately I had to learn to stop being polite to hearing people when it comes to working with sound. They have no say in it at all. That's when I understood what ownership of sound actually means.

You have continuously explored "sound" through various mediums, including drawing, installation, sound, and performance. Could you share, in your own words, what "sound" means to you today?

Everything is still hearing-centric, and sound plays a huge role in that. As a kid, I was taught to be passive and accept other people’s rules about sound and what it meant. Eventually, I started seeing it as a tool instead of something oppressive and disempowering, a matter of perceiving it on my own terms, not theirs. These days, I'm very conscious of sound through my sign language interpreters and my own kids. I care a great deal about how my voice is being depicted, so there's a lot of trust involved with interpreters. My 2-year-old recently signed "baby is crying," and when I looked around, sure enough, there was a crying baby. I've come to enjoy getting sound cues from the people around me.

In a past interview, you noted that "English is linear, but ASL is like a chord." Just as a musical score cannot fully capture music, sign language is multidimensional and spatial, resembling music in that subtle inflections determine the overall meaning. I understand that you became deeply interested in the concepts of music, scores, and musical notation during your time at Bard College. What was the most memorable moment when you began visualizing sound or the movements of sign language onto the framework of a musical score? What specific trials, errors, or realizations did you experience while translating the multidimensionality of sign language into a score format?

Early in my career, I made so many artistic decisions without realizing how hearing-centric they were. I was making sound safe, pleasing, or even aesthetic for hearing audiences. At the same time, I worried that certain aspects of my work might unknowingly exclude deaf people. It took me a while to find the line between both audiences. In the end, it's about my experience, not theirs.

When it comes to drawing or composing a score, there aren't many references for me to draw on, aside from the glossing of American Sign Language (ASL), or in other words the written representation of ASL on paper. It's not a well established system, and several versions exist, but it pushed me to start combining gloss with musical notation. I never looked back. 

Your drawings are filled with delicate and complex traces, such as smudges, stains, and strikethroughs instead of erased words. Unlike conventional drawing standards that prioritize standardized neatness, what is your reason for actively allowing these subtle marks to remain? What do these traces say about life and the way you perceive sound?

Deaf history is often erased, pushed aside, and inaccurately recorded. Almost always written by people who aren't deaf. There's something political about leaving behind your traces, or smudges. I also like keeping musical dynamics, notes, and staff lines a bit loose. Maybe a bit more human. I use these, plus motion lines, to tell stories or share ideas. When I end up drawing overly neat lines, it feels like I'm being too considerate of how I'm perceived, and then it turns into performing rather than making.

In the past, you mentioned worrying that your thoughts might not be clearly conveyed when communicating with hearing people, and you have actively used infographics and text to make your work’s message clear. In fact, the anxiety of potentially being misunderstood in communication is a universal experience shared by everyone, including hearing people. Today, many hearing people are contemplating deeper ways of communicating through your work. As you express your voice clearly through art and navigate communication within and between Deaf and hearing communities, what are some new questions or themes you are currently contemplating regarding your relationship with the public or these communities?

It's actually nice being listened to these days. I often put my very specific experiences in a format with enough context and flexibility that people can relate to them and interpret them through their own experiences. Sometimes anxiety makes me over-explain with too many words, but I try to step back and cut some away to make it more relatable. For example, I recently drew "Cross My Mind," then realized deleting "My" made it stronger. Maybe anxiety is kind of like my shaman, reminding me to chill the fuck out.

While your personal style incorporates vibrant colors, your artwork primarily maintains a minimal, black-and-white tone. Is there a specific reason you limit the use of color in your work? Do you feel that using color might affect the clarity of your message, or do you have plans or interest in exploring a broader color palette in your future projects?

Again, anxiety got the best of me. I’m obsessed with being as clear as possible, especially since I often work with sign language interpreters and need to give them clear information so they can turn it into spoken English with accuracy. But lately I’ve been slowly exploring color (!). I made a new series of paintings with traces of secondary colors for my solo at Gallery Hyundai. Not only that, but I’m also making huge deep blue shaped canvases for my glass pavilion show at MUDAM in Luxembourg. I’m enjoying this growing privilege to be a bit more vague and being able to explore new colors.

Your work goes beyond simple linguistic understanding, offering a new awareness of the senses. In particular, "The Sound of Temperature Rising" resonated deeply in the way it visualizes and gives form to a realm not typically categorized as sound. What was the specific background behind creating this work? Furthermore, what are your thoughts on extending this sensory exploration beyond human-centered definitions of sound into non-human realms or environmental dimensions?

When I made that drawing, I was pregnant with my first child and in my third trimester. My body was pumping so much blood to grow the baby that my temperature ran higher than normal, and I struggled to sleep at night. I was thinking about how musical notes could actually describe this experience, both physical and emotional. I like connecting notes to things people don’t normally associate them with. It’s almost like breaking rules.

Starting with your large-scale billboard project at the Whitney Museum, you have expanded your practice into large public art, such as murals. How has this expansion in scale influenced your visual  approach or the way you convey messages in your work Furthermore, could you share a preview of the type of expansion your upcoming new work at the MMCA will present?

Oh, Jennie Goldstein is the best! She’s a curator at the Whitney and the one who invited me to do my first large-scale billboard. It was right after my first child was born, and I was looking through drawings I’d made earlier that year. I wasn’t sure about their scalability, but seeing a small drawing blown up like that convinced me to go in that direction. The billboard suddenly opened so many doors and shifted my practice toward murals. Every time I get asked to do a mural, I ask for as much space as possible: ‘How about the ceiling? The floor?’ I think I like being in people’s faces, and doing large scale work is an extension of that.

I am so over the moon to do the next edition of the MMCA x LG OLED commission exhibition. My piece is based on a string of signs that requires you to touch the body: ‘Have Many Dumb Fights Against Rock.’ Korea has a long history with scholars’ rocks, and it coincides with my recent series on the mind as a rock. So it’s like you’re arguing with this rock and it’s doing nothing. It means many things, but one stands out to me: the sense of futility in addressing something that is so weighty that it can’t budge an inch.

Your identity as a mother also seems to play an important role in your practice. I personally found your work "One Week of Lullabies for Roux" highly intriguing. As your child grows, you must be navigating new experiences as a parent. Could you share any new themes or areas of exploration regarding the concept of "family" that you are currently focusing on?

I used to find myself in a room with two different minds (my first kid and my husband). But now the second kid has shown up as a third, so it’s four minds constantly colliding or coming together. Family dynamics often show up in my work, whether it's looking back to my own upbringing or thinking through the complexities of having kids of my own. You can see I’ve started adding more and more minds as rocks in my drawings.

Your recent solo exhibition "American Sigh Language" at the François Ghebaly Gallery features compelling elements in its sound installation. You recorded the sighs of 66 Deaf collaborators from around the world and produced them as custom vinyl records. What was the background behind using "sigh," which shares a similar pronunciation with "sign," as the central concept? Additionally, what were the criteria for selecting the collaborators, and are there any memorable stories from the production process you could share?

My Korean friend in Berlin was making a poster that was supposed to read ‘Kimchi Workshop in Sign Language,’ but she accidentally wrote the n as an h. I loved the typo so much that I asked her permission to use it. Most of the contributors are American, but some are from elsewhere, like Europe and Asia. Every time I started explaining the concept of sigh as labor, they all instantly knew what I meant and said, ‘Of course, I’ll do it!’ Funnily enough, I think all of them used a voice memo app for the first time ever, so I walked them through step by step to show them how to do it correctly. I’m very honored that they trusted me with sound files of their sighing.

In 2018, you presented the artwork "Too Much Future." Years later, is there a different aspect of what lies ahead that you are currently observing as an artist? We would be grateful if you could share the artistic direction you hope to pursue moving forward.

It now feels like the opposite: we’re behind the future all the time. Constantly catching up but never there. We’ve lost the concept of nuance in cultures and languages. Everything has become one size fits all. I’m not sure what I’d like to do next, but I want to continue growing with my family while staying active in my career.