Christine Sun Kim

Christine Sun Kim is a Korean American artist, who works with illustration, video, large-scale murals and sound. Kim is deaf, and much of her work is influenced both aesthetically and sensorially by her experiences of navigating the world as a deaf person. Stretching the parameters of graphic notation and scale, her work counters ableist narratives, carving space for viewpoints not readily explored in popular media. Kim uses a combination of text and imagery in her works, combining illustrative drawing, her signature handwritten script and musical notes to convey the musicality and poetic capacity of American Sign Language. The large scale of her murals and public installation pieces questions the authority of spoken language over ASL. Her ‘Captioning the City’ series for example, playfully brought large scale captions of sonic fragments of the city onto the exterior of buildings, making these habitual sounds legible to non-hearing people exploring the city. Throughout her different projects Kim is able to weave personal, political and social statements into her work, using infographics to find a way of communicating beyond the parameters of simply visual or textual aids.