SEATTLE, WA.- Christine Sun Kim (b. 1980, Orange County, California; based in Berlin, Germany) is a path-breaking artist whose work across drawing, video, and performance explores the social and political dimensions of sound. At the Henry, exhibiting in Seattle for the first time, Kim presents Ghost(ed) Notes, a newly commissioned mural that animates the museum’s east façade with her signature visual approach.
Deeply informed by the power of non-verbal communication, much of Kim’s artwork combines aspects of graphic and musical notation of American Sign Language. The resulting compositions have a unique grammar and structure that engage both Kim’s own experience of being Deaf in a hearing-dominant society and collective conditions that shape whose voices have social currency. Kim’s work begins to remedy the lack of Deaf representation in the public realm and in art, creating opportunities for expanded ways of relating to the aural environment and the potential for connection across hearing and Deaf communities.
Kim’s mural for the Henry belongs to an emerging body of work in which the artist examines “ghost notes,” musical symbols that indicate a slight sound without a specific pitch, almost like silence, but with rhythmic presence. In this work, the language of musical notation becomes a space to explore the colloquial notion of being “ghosted,” in which communication from someone suddenly ceases without explanation. In her composition, Kim intentionally distorts the music staff so that some notes lie outside of its structure, evoking different forms of exclusion, isolation, blockage, and refusal. Comprised of four lines rather than the standard five in traditional music notation, Kim’s drawn staff echoes the way she signs the word by tucking her thumb and moving four fingers horizontally. The contorted four-line staff, riddled with gaps, calls into question the structural dynamics shaping who or what we intentionally or subconsciously exclude when creating our social spaces, and how that affects our communication and connection with others.
An equal commentary on accessibility and ableist exclusion as it is on agency through refusal, Kim’s mural attests that no sound is incidental. The mural invites viewers to question what the resulting score, full of palpable gaps and notes left outside the margins of audibility, might sound like.
Christine Sun Kim is an American artist based in Berlin. Kim's practice considers how sound operates in society, deconstructing the politics of sound and exploring how oral languages operate as social currency. Kim has exhibited and performed internationally, including at the Gwangju Biennale (2023); Secession, Vienna (2023); Queens Museum, New York (2022); the Drawing Center, New York (2022); the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2021); Manchester International Festival, Manchester (2021); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge (2020); Whitney Biennial, New York (2019); Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo (2019); Art Institute of Chicago (2018); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2017); De Appel Arts Center, Amsterdam (2017); Berlin Biennale (2016); Shanghai Biennale (2016); MoMA PS1, New York (2015) and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013), among numerous others. Kim’s awards and fellowships include an MIT Media Lab Fellowship, a United States Artists fellowship, a Ford and Mellon Foundations’ Disabilities Future Fellowship, and the Prix International d’Art Contemporain of the Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco. Her works are held in numerous prominent collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, LACMA, Tate Britain, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.
Christine Sun Kim: Ghost(ed) Notes is organized by Nina Bozicnik, Senior Curator, with Em Chan, Curatorial Assistant.
