Christine Sun Kim | Oh Me Oh My

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Christine Sun Kim, "When Grammar Mood," 2020

Courtesy of the Artist and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles. Photo: Paul Salveson

Oh Me Oh My

For more than ten years now, Christine Sun Kim has been engaged with the ways sound is understood, experienced and valued. Upending the notion of the sonic as a solely auditory occurrence, the California-born, Berlin-based artist foregrounds sound’s visual, spatial and political properties across a variety of mediums including drawing, video, performance, and installation.

Exploring and employing elements of American Sign Language (ASL) — the artist’s first language — alongside other visual communication systems such as musical notation, infographics and memes, the formal vocabulary of Kim’s work is a singular one, engaging with critical precision and deadpan humour the politics of language, listening and voice.

In Oh Me Oh My, Kim brings together a broad selection of recent drawings, along with a new large-scale mural and two public artworks installed on the CAG Façade and at nearby Yaletown-Roundhouse Station. Whether diagramming the structural and cultural underpinnings of seemingly personal decisions, tracing social debts to consider what we owe one another, or mapping the distortions and delays inherent to Deaf/hearing communication, Kim’s works challenge widely held hierarchies that tether voice inextricably to sound, disrupting the implicit authority of the spoken over the signed and the aural over other perceptual planes.