After watching Todd Selby’s video on Christine Sun Kim and her artwork I feel I have a new appreciation for sound and these abstract concepts that I just take for granted in my experience. During the beginning of the video Christine starts signing to us and explains that she had grown up internalizing the idea that sound never belonged to her as a deaf person, that she had to be respectful of other people’s possession. She experienced one of the basic human senses through the lens of what others told her she could not do and have, and because of that her curiosity and creativity in her sound art is all the more poignant.
By expressing sounds and relating them through movement, Christine is not only reclaiming and making hers what was always denied her which adds an emotional context to view the work, but she’s also expanding the way that we non-deaf people can experience and think about something we’ve had access to our whole lives. Kim’s work is transformative in a way, taking a unique medium and moving it into the world of movement and displacement, spreading paint onto a canvas via vibrations.
I think her work also speaks about broader issues of communication. She signs to us in the video, telling us she didn’t have access to language as a kid, her parents struggling to use English and Sign Language equally. There’s this element of repression and ideas fighting to come out but without the traditional tools available for her to do so. Through art she is freed in a way to express herself and in my eyes be recognized in her own way for the vividly creative and thoughtful art that so obviously bursts forth from her unique perspective.
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