Last summer, a small plane was carried sign An interesting phrase about Manchester, England, “smiley sound”.
At the Queens Museum in New York just now“Time Owes Me Rest Again” is scribbled on the wall and each super-large word with a curve swooping across a huge mural.
And earlier this year, visitors to the Mildred Lane Kemper Museum in St. Louis faced Artwork that fills the atrium List the causes of personal trauma, including “Dinner Table Syndrome”.
“I’m finally able to do what I want to do, and I’m aiming for it,” said artist Christine San Kim, who is in charge of all this, in her longtime hometown of Berlin’s American Sign Language. rice field.
Born as a hearing-impaired, Kim said she knew she was denied the opportunity to offer hearings while growing up, and later as an ambitious artist.
This is a common experience, according to Gerard Buckley, President of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf and Dean of the Rochester Institute of Technology, where Kim studied as an undergraduate student. “Hearing-impaired children around the world,” Dr. Buckley wrote in an email. “I often hear negative messages about their career orientation.”
Kim’s work is now sought after by collectors and museums around the world, Buckley said she has become a role model for hearing-impaired children, and the artist is now “trying to make up for all these years.” “.
Kim, 42, has been working on bittersweet paintings (charts, texts, sheet music), videos, audio, performances, and weird airplane banners over the last decade, poetic, political, charismatic, and candid. I made a work. He overturns language and sound practices.
At MoMA PS1 in Queens in 2015, Kim performed an installation that asked visitors to walk with the speaker in their hands and the protruding antenna in contact with the overhead of the wire. Upon successful completion, a voice was heard from the speaker reading the text. It was a difficult task and was a physical embodiment of how sparse and robust communication was.
As her reputation grew and her work was featured in increasingly high-profile venues, she often became a very rare artist with a public platform that transcended the isolated world of art.
At the 2020 Super Bowl, what she said was both protest and patriotism, Kim. Played the national anthem In American Sign Language, or ASL. But Fox, who was broadcasting her game, showed her for just a few seconds before she cut it out. She was the decision she blamed in a guest essay for the New York Times.
Details of Deaf culture
Five years ago she delivered Very popular TED talk About navigating the world of ASL, her art, and hearing. Initially, he was hesitant to invite TED — “I was a little embarrassed about how corporate it was.”-This story, now seen more than two million times, changed her life and turned her into a job. It attracted worldwide attention.
Kim has lived in Berlin for nearly 10 years and was born to parents who emigrated from South Korea in Southern California.one of Her painting Is a pie chart labeled “Why my hearing parents sign”, and two of the big slices are “to make me feel loved” and “my sister is also deaf” “No”, but the biggest one is “cooler than my parents”. .. “
I couldn’t attend the sculpture class in high school because I didn’t have an interpreter, and even RIT (who had a large Deaf population and was nominated as an excellent graduate this year) couldn’t enroll in some courses. The same reason.
After graduating from college, she moved to New York and worked as an assistant at the Lexington Deaf School and as an educator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, thinking about her future.
“Deaf people are always teachers by default,” she recalled. “We have to teach the hearing impaired about ASL, Deaf culture, etc. So I think I’ve given up on being an artist too.”
(Like many other companions, Kim capitalizes the word deaf to imply a common culture.)
Kim received MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2006, but was still lethargic when he transformed the German capital for residence.
Many exhibitions in the city were related to sound art, which became her idea.
“I was scared, so it took me a while to admit that I wanted to work with sound. It was actually a few years,” Kim said. “I thought dealing with sound was very oppressive, rooted or dominant in our society.”
However, she eventually enrolled in Bard College’s Sound Program, which encourages an experimental approach to the media, and obtained her second MFA in 2013 before settling in Berlin. On her last trip, she met the artist Thomas Mader, 38. She is now her husband and occasionally a collaborator. He studied ASL and helped teach his daughter, Lou, who was just five years old.
Much of Kim’s art encourages viewers to rethink how they hear and perceive, and to think about the limitations, risks, and misunderstandings associated with communicating in any language.
At the Queen’s Museum, the zoom lines in her gigantic mural suggest a cartoon action, but in reality it shows the move needed to sign its rebellious title, “Time OwesMeRest Again.”
The work “is the foreground of ASL as a language and is not generally centered in a monumental way of space,” said museum director Sally Tarant.
The mysterious airplane banner (“The Sound of Smoking”) comes from Kim’s “Captioning the City” project, whose text is playfully scattered around Manchester, with closed captions in a non-verbal way of expression. It hints at how to clarify or obscure the meaning accordingly. Material like music.
Recently, an echo has appeared in Kim’s work. “In my hearing-impaired life, everything repeats or echoes,” she said. “Beth is basically repeating what I’m saying, and the captions are repeating or echoing.”
(She mentioned her ASL interpreter Beth Staehle in a video interview in this article.)
Within the view of deafness in the world of hearing, or within the Deaf community itself, Kim said there is always the danger of a single view, echo being unknowingly repeated.
“Echo trap” Was the title of Vast mural Explore the dangers she presented at the Art and Disability Exhibition at the Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK) in Frankfurt, Germany, from 2020 to 21. A black line bounced along the wall, with the word “HAND PALM” above it, nodding to ASL’s “echo” gesture. It seemed to swallow the room.
Her equally expansive work, Stacking Trauma, seen in St. Louis, evoked topics such as getting stuck in a supper after hearing the voices of unsignable people. (That is “dinner table syndrome”.)
“Political, activist, great work, mostly part of all generations of young American and female artists, activists are part of their work,” Kim said. Said Susanne Pfeffer, director of the.
At the same MMK exhibition, Kim exhibited the work of “Deaf Rage”. This is a series of casual charts recording her frustration with the art industry and the wider world. Induce one anger example: “A curator who thinks it is fair to split the interpreter and my fee.”
As part of her work, Kim is the co-founder of the initiative with designer Ravi Vasavan. The power of the hearing impaired Rendered as a symbol, <0 /.
“Deaf people have worked really hard to protect, fight and become activists, and there is really no room for fun or play in our lives,” the artist said. .. “We feel like we can’t play enough because of our identity, or because of the way society is set up.”
Kim’s mischievous and sharp art, and even her activism, tries to correct it.
“I hope deafness is not just a barrier,” she said while discussing <0 /. She said, "Hearing loss is also about joy. It's about the community. This is the way to tell our people."
