Christine Sun Kim in “Friends & Strangers”

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Hovering above a table full of pastels and charcoal sticks, artist Christine Sun Kim organizes her studio space and dusts off her hands, ready to work. “I’ve just been noticing that my life is one big echo,” says Kim. “Or rather, maybe just small echoes that become one big echo, and that’s something that’s been a part of my life since I was born.” These echoes appear throughout her life, in the repetitions of her words by American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters she works with and in the language itself, as evidenced throughout the artist’s drawings. In the REDCAT theater in Los Angeles, California, Kim gives a talk about her work, where she shares insights into why she makes the work she does. Her black-and-white drawings are often infographics or diagrams, like the pie charts Why I Do Not Read Lips (2018) or Shit Hearing People Say to Me (2018), allowing her to speak across language barriers. 

At Somerset House in London, England, Kim directs the installation of four new works on canvas with the assistance of her interpreter, one of the many types of collaboration familiar to Kim. Working with her husband, Thomas Mader, and their daughter, Roux, has been another recent addition. For an exhibition, the three each created drawings based on musical staff lines, and Roux’s A Song About Family (2023) acted as the flag for Kim’s show at Somerset House. Kim’s 2023 exhibition at JTT Gallery, How Do You Hold Your Debt, contains a suite of new drawings inspired by her recognition of the differences in quality of life between Berlin and New York City, chiefly to do with debt and financial pressures. Kim’s work crosses boundaries between Deaf culture and popular culture in the subjects she tackles, and in her practice, she makes a conscious effort to participate in “the hearing world.” Her mural at the Queens Museum, Time Owes Me Rest Again (2022), reflects not only the exhausting activity of demanding access and rights as a Deaf person but also the exhaustion of being a resident of Corona, Queens, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, or the exhaustion of anyone fighting to be heard. “I want Deaf lives to be in your mind and be part of what we consider acceptable,” says Kim. “If you don’t see us, we have no place to be.”